Like I said in my previous post, I'm getting up to some of those things that have been left undone.  I got a good chunk of a Patreon request done (long overdue), been trying to do bits and pieces of work on Rhythm Quest here and there, vacuumed the carpets, and such.  Slogging through JaSmix logistics, as well.  The start of the week hasn't been going half bad, really.

Unfortunately, I also realized I've been suffering from anxiety, sigh.  It's been a while, so I had forgotten exactly what it feels like (a little different than depression).  The curious thing about anxiety is that sometimes giving yourself a break helps, but then, also, sometimes just getting things done helps, too.  It's an odd sort of mix; I guess depending on how you look at it, maybe you can't really go wrong.  Well, probably can't hurt to try and get some more DDR play in, so I'll have to try that.

Meowmie has been sleeping with me again :3  It's always nice having some company.  When I went across the desert and left behind all of those other things, I think in the end it was really this meowmie that I kept.  The prideful lion, haha.  This meowmie certainly is kind of like that.  But I love her a lot, and she loves me too.  Getting to know this meowmie I think somehow showed me how I best make friends.  I noticed it most when I was interacting with another group of meowmies, and I was drawn to...the prince of the group, the whiny one who didn't want to be held and stayed in the corner a bit.  Something about becoming close to someone by sharing comfortable space together.  Ah, the way of the introvert.

I'm at a really weird place with playing games right now, I think.  Caesar 3 is sort of on hold since I managed to beat the peaceful missions on very hard.  Melee continues to be a once-in-a-while thing to just throw on casually; it's a weird thing because on the one hand I enjoy looking for improvement, but on the other hand I don't enjoy it that much.  Pokemon Unite has gotten a bit stale, though I don't quite mind it.  Honestly the worst thing about it is the lack of faith in the direction of the game, I think.

Mentoring the ALTTPR mentees has been fun, but ALTTPR seeds themselves, I haven't been feeling incredibly motivated about.  I ran an SMZ3 seed the other day and I honestly don't know if it was as fun as I wanted it to be.  I'm not really sure.  So...yeah, I really don't know.  It's not like nothing is fun, and it's not like I don't have anything to look forward to.  Heck, even Pop'n Music is fun to throw on and just jam for a couple songs -- and somehow my skills have actually improved, despite lacking consistent regular play.  But I guess nothing is really standing out to me right now at the moment.

We're at the close of week 2 of the ALTTPR mentor tournament.  One of my mentees took a win this week, the other took a loss.  It's been going alright so far, I feel like I've been being helpful, which is all you can really ask for, really.

The year is almost half over now, which makes me feel a bit of trepidation given the low amount of progress I've made on Rhythm Quest (comparatively, at least) this year.  Well, part of that couldn't be avoided, I guess, but it also makes me question whether I'm going at a good pace right now.

"Right now" also isn't the best time for me, productivity-wise, for whatever reason.  It's a weird feeling since I feel like it's been so automatic for most of my life, I have to really think back to times when it felt more like this (usually when I'm starting to fall ill...).

Well, tomorrow is the start of a new week.  We can try to take care of one or two things that have been haunting me a bit.  That's how I think of them sometimes, really.  Ghosts of things left undone.  They always come back to me, keeping me true to what I should be doing.

But have they been keeping me true to who I once was?

"Please don't take my meowmie away", you said.  But did you ever think about the place that meowmie once called home?

I've been feeling really unmotivated lately, I can't tell whether it's normal, whether it's physiological, or whether it's some kind of depression or trauma response.  I keep saying that it's all alright because I still manage to stay productive even during these times, but I have also seen my productivity really go down as well, so it's something that I am continuing to monitor.  Maybe at this point what I just need is small discrete tasks that I can tackle easily, things like how I dealt with all my keycap stuff yesterday, as well as folding laundry and all of that.

Still, even in this state, there are some things that I don't really fail to do.  I wrote one of my annual letters to Kiki, and I've been managing meals for the house as usual.  Cooking, and indeed, planning for cooking, does take some nontrivial amount of time out of my daily life, but it's just incredibly rewarding.

Somehow my keyboard stuff (i.e. "new toys") is something that I'm really looking forward to for some reason.  I guess that's not a bad thing, it's always good to have something like that.

I passed Maxx Unlimited the other week, surprisingly, which really goes to show that my DDR skills and physical stamina/speed have really improved significantly since the old days.  I did another Max 300 clear without really breaking TOO much of a sweat (obviously still breaking a sweat though) as well, so yeah.

I finished off the last mission of my Very Hard Caesar 3 (Augustus) playthrough, yet I still want to just play the game more, haha.  I could start playing custom missions, of course, or go through the Military scenarios, maybe, but I'm also interested in seeing if I can record (segmented) video playthroughs (maybe narrated?) of each of the missions done "well".  I think Caesar 3 is really fun to just go at a level and play it for a long time, kind of like SimCity or whatever, but I feel like if I really want to demonstrate my mastery I'd be able to really plan out how to tackle each level and clear it =efficiently=, without dallying and wasting a ton of time, or having a lot of trouble with resources and finance management, etc.  This is much easier said than done, but maybe the easier levels will at least be somewhat straightforward to do it on.

Yeah, I dunno.

Things have been ok, things are a little weird this week, but not in a bad way necessarily.

I ordered some new keycaps!  Been a while since I looked at keyboard stuff, excited to get them in the mail and see how they do.  After ordering those I also spent a while (longer than I'd like to admit) wondering if there were any actual keyboards I would be interested in getting as an upgrade to my current one; unfortunately none seem to really hit a sweet spot for me in terms of color, form factor, and features all at the same time.  I'll throw one on my wishlist anyways...

The 2023 Link to the Past Rando Go Mode Podcast Mentor Tournament is underway!  I've been working with a couple of mentees and have had one do their first mentored race with me as well, that has been really fun and I hope that these mentees will be able to continue improving their game, there is certainly a lot of things to learn and improve on.

Dance event planning continues, I have FNW coming up, then Dancebreak later, then JaSmix after that...

After all that talk about thinking about how my relationships should be formed and maintained and how I should socialize with people, funnily enough I find myself wondering why I should even bother.  Okay, maybe that's a bit too negative of a way of putting it, really it's more like, I've gotten wary of what I should invest in.  It's important not to get burned out, right?  I think part of that is realizing that maybe there are a lot of things that aren't really worth putting that much effort into.

I dunno what else.

I have a strange like/dislike relationship with melee.  Maybe it's similar to social dance in that way?  Though, the likes and dislikes are pretty different.  I was watching some Fiction (was about to say Druggedfox lol) coaching sessions and was inspired to jump into unranked to see if I could apply some of it all.  I got a certain sort of weird validation when some Falco player signaled in-game that basically I was being a lame-ass marth player who just grabbed -- to myself, I thought "that's RIGHT I just grab, that is exactly what Marth is supposed to play for in this matchup, I am 100% doing the right thing".  Unfortunately my punish game and techchasing just isn't up to snuff -- partly for lack of grinding out the techskill, partly because I'm used to having less lag / more time to react and more consistent control of my character.  If I want to enjoy the game more that is something I'll have to just grind out.  But the real question is do I WANT to?  I'm not really sure.  Three are aspects of the game that I really enjoy playing and thinking about, but after playing a while I don't always really feel happy about it.

I feel like within the microcosm of a set of melee interactions there are so many more "negative" feeling things that can happen to you compared to the other activities that I do.  I'm not talking about people being BM or even the feeling of losing a match or anything like that, I just mean like flubbing techskill and getting punished for it, or simply missing an opportunity that you should have gotten.  Sure mistakes happen in ALTTPR too (brainfarts, too), but the emotional feeling isn't as pointed since you aren't literally getting hit out of what you were trying to do -- not to mention, mistakes in ALTTPR happen at a much slower pace.

I'm doing pretty fine, yeah.

Grilling has turned out well, though of course maybe not exactly how I expected.  It's certainly not something I'd pull out every week, and I can cook more efficiently with either the stove or the broiler, but at the same time, it has its own sort of charm, for sure.  My grill setup is a little peculiar, so it's probably actually not the best for most things, but I'm still learning about how to do things best.  Ironically I haven't even cooked any chicken on it yet, despite that being the main thing I got it for.  Next time...

I went to Jammix this past Friday.  It was...fine.  I can't really lie, it wasn't really the best time, but I was honest to myself about it and what would have made it better or worse.  At least I felt beautiful while I was there.  You know, there is an element of self-confidence in being able to do what you want, but there is also an important element of self-confidence in knowing what it is that you want and don't want.  Now that my emotions have calmed down a bit since last month, I'm able to look back and think about how silly it was that I was considering some of the things that I was.  That's not to say that changes to my relationships weren't in order, just that...the way that I carry myself at dance really didn't need to change much at all.  But in the end, having thought about it more has helped me, if only because it brings me a certain kind of peace, understanding and knowing what is right or not right for me at any given moment.  Not only is there no need for me to force myself to do something I don't want to, there's simply no reason to, either.  Sure, there are avenues of my life in which sometimes I need to push myself to do something a little uncomfortable.  But I realized after thinking about it more that this was not necessarily one of them.  Happiness is partly about trying your best to make certain things happen, but there's no reason it can't also just be about having things happen to you.  I don't need to work so hard, all the time, for everyone.

I keep on going at it.  Life, I mean.  A little bit of this, a little bit of that.  Steady progress.  Tonight I dealt with some tax stuff, worked a little on some Rhythm Quest debugging, sent an email, etc.  There's still more work, where that came from, but you know how it is -- I did my daily dose of progress, that's good enough for now.

The Go Mode Podcast Mentor Tournament is approaching quite rapidly, which is really exciting!  In addition to that, I'm looking forward to playing more Caesar 3 / Augustus, really.  Most recently I finished Caesarea, kind of an annoying mission where you're tight on money and start with a terrible city that's about to burn down (and make Mars angry), and I'm onto Londonium, which looks to be a very large open map.  Only real challenge is that a lot of the farmland is on a large island in the south, so getting the food from there to more open areas might be a little tricky.  But I'm looking forward to it!

More visual readability problems in games (System Shock 1 Remake)

Sigh.  Here we go again.

5 years ago I wrote about visual readability problems in Smash Ultimate.

I'm back at it again, this time looking at the System Shock Remake, which recently released (after ~7 years of development??).

Being a huge fan of System Shock 2 (despite its flaws and shortcomings), I've been both sort of looking forward to this remake, but also kind of skeptical of it.  Before deciding whether I'd purchase it, I decided I'd not only watch some reviews, but also play the demo of it.  I'm glad I did -- I don't think I can stand this game.

Booting the demo up didn't really give me a great first impression, as the UI seems to be cut off on both sides on my monitor:

5:4 aspect ratio users, shunted again.  This is the kind of thing I see all the time in Ludum Dare entries, but come on, really?  Things didn't get that much better, as the resolution settings dialog was a bit finicky, and the key rebinding menu seemed to....just, not apply?  Odd...

Well, those are just minor things, though.  The question is, what does the game itself feel like?  um...well, first impressions weren't great.  The intro is somehow...worse than the one from 1994, and seems to drag on forever, with a weird distorted fisheye lens that isn't particular pleasant to look at.  The cutscene just....goes on and on and isn't particularly interesting.  The one from 1994 is cheesy as hell, sure, but it's only 2 minutes long -- the new one is THREE TIMES as long, and features a ton of first-person "arm/hand" animations, which as I understand are featured very annoyingly prominently in the game...  There's other problems in the first few minutes of the game too -- lots of little key items that aren't really highlighted, the "currently-looking at" text is super obscured at the top of the HUD, melee combat feels AWFUL, etc.

...but anyways, none of that is what I'm here to talk about.  No, we're here to talk about visual readability.  The lack of it.

First thing's first, take at a look at these two screenshots that I took from one of the first areas of the game:

Which one of these screenshots looks better to you?  What do you think the difference is?

The only difference between these two screenshots is that the top one is taken with all graphics settings at "ultra" and the bottom is taken with all of the graphics settings set to "low".  Call me crazy, but I'd say it's very clearly obvious that the bottom one is way more readable.  With the top one you can barely make out the geometry of the level, and everything is just too dark to even appreciate.

Try reading the image again, this time smaller and in grayscale:

Yeah...it's impossible.

But it gets worse.  This game falls prey to some of the same problems I commented on with Smash Ultimate in terms of irrelevant details being highlighted, making the scene composition extremely busy.  Here's another grayscale shot for you to decipher:

Tough, right?  Turns out when you have a very dark environment and you fill it with lots of little bright lights, your attention is drawn to those:

Look, I get it.  You're supposed to be in an abandoned space station.  It's supposed to be all dark and moody.  Hell, the original System Shock 2 had some spaces that were dark, too.  But when was the last time that you walked into a building in real life and had half of the floor hidden in shadow, with certain parts of it lit up by spotlights?  That's not how sensible lighting works, and it doesn't make for good readability.  Your eyes need to be able to parse the level geometry, which means that the silhouette of the level should be the thing that stands out contrast-wise.  Here's a shot from System Shock 2 to illustrate this:

There's still some elements of light and shadow here.  Yes, there are overhead lights, too.  But they're not blinding me.  I can actually see the entire floor, and the walls.  It's very clear to me what the geometry of the space is.

Here's another example from an older game -- it's a screenshot of Quake 3, where effective use of lighting is used to create a cohesive space:

Notice how the lights on the wall are elements of interest without being overbearing.  The shadows cast by the pedestals help you identify them as points of interest, and your eye is also naturally drawn to the big hole in the ceiling.

Just like with 2d artwork, there's room for various styles of lighting and contrast to make things work.  Here's a totally different approach shown off in the interior levels of Serious Sam:

Compared to the low-contrast, high ambient light style of System Shock 2, the shadows here are much more contrasty and dynamic, but the dark areas indicate steps or seams in the level geometry, so it's obvious where the edges all are.

Now let's go back to the System Shock Remake...

Sigh.  Let's do this exercise again.  What elements have the most contrast in this level scene?  Well, at least the big robot's eye is highlighted, so that's something done right (if only I could...you know, see the rest of it...).  But other than that, the brightest visual elements are....the decals and neon lights on the top section of the screen.  The ones that have no bearing on actual gameplay.  Sigh...

Now, I'm not saying you can't have dark and interestingly-lit areas in your game.  That can definitely be an effective way to establish an area as claustrophobic, or to set up anticipation for a scary moment.  The Last Of Us does this regularly, with several areas that have you take out your flashlight as you engage in stealth-combat with zombies with limited visibility.  But those scenes are =contrasted= from the outdoor scenes where you're in broad daylight.

Unfortunately it seems like not only is the System Shock 2 Remake mostly the same lighting style throughout, but the different areas also just....have the same aesthetic.  Blue lights everywhere.  One reviewer puts it this way:

"When every room is the same-colored metal floors and walls with lights on them, how am I supposed to build an image of this place in my head?  You =can=...you can do it, but it takes so long.  And it makes me so bored to be walking around seeing the same stuff for hours.  Finally getting in the elevator and expecting to see something new, just to open the doors and find another floor covered in basically the same aesthetic.  *sigh*"

And it's really sad, because looking at the classic from 1994 and then remake from 2023, I have to say that the game from 1994 is just easier to look at and read.  Sure, it may be all pixelated and at a low resolution, but at least I can tell what is going on and I don't feel like I'm trapped in a laser-tag arena:

It really doesn't have to be this way, but I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with this kind of thing as it seems to become more and more commonplace to throw readability out the window in favor of making things "bright, shiny, and contrasty" everywhere, particularly where your visual attention is NOT supposed to be.

I get that this is a lot harder to do in a 3d environment where making things stand out is not as simple as "make sure your backdrops are less saturated".  It's harder for me to find good screenshot examples of games in the past that are pleasing to look at and easy to read, but they certainly do exist.

When you look at older games, they of course look dated, but there is something incredibly pleasing (comforting?) at being able to look at a 2d image at a glance and build the resulting 3d model in your head.

Now, try doing the same for this screenshot:

You can't, right?  When you can't see walls, floors, or ceilings, you can only really guess at what the space looks like.  All your eyes see is a bunch of red lights everywhere -- where are you supposed to focus your attention?

It's not like we need to go all the way back to the 1990s for this, either.  Here's Portal from 2007:

Anyways...I uninstalled that demo and crossed that game off my wishlist.  Bleh.