Topics

It's not a unique ability (you can do it in Minecraft and a few other games), but it's a bonus. Someone created a ray-tracing program in-game, to run a vaguely Doom-like game ^^
I got Factorio yesterday and have started to familiarize myself with what is, essentially, a signar-driven conveyor belt simulator.

Story is charming, although unrealistic; you lose your spaceship on impact, are the sole survivor, and will go on to build a massive and high-tech base, because you have an IQ of 400.

Any of you have played it? 

Anyone who watched this anime?
I gave up back in season 1, due to bad plot/terrible dialogue. But then started watching again and saw season 4.

Imo this show had a very charming idea, titans attacking walled humans, but the plot twist was not good and it deteriorated to convoluted storyline and gimmicks (origin of titans).

But some scenes are nice:

Still, even that scene, needs you to plug your brain out, to accept that a power with the resources of two entire continents behind it, couldn't install battleship turrets on the port and shoot at the titans legs ^^

It's a building model I created with Blender (supposed to be the fortified inn from WH fantasy).
I am mostly annoyed with the lack of specific style, due to the colors and shading- but maybe it is just overall 'realism'.
I'd like it to look more suggestive. How would you go about achieving such an effect?

I'd nominate the Kothoga, from The Relic.
The movie is pretty decent, and it owes that mostly to the monster - though 80s-90s Penelope Ann Miller is always good to see 

The thread is supposed to be a discussion of twists in literature (film/tv series can also be mentioned), with some theoretical elements, but mostly geared towards presenting examples you find of note.


I think that the literary twist can be divided to a few distinct categories, most of which have to do with form.


Scope-wise, any author/creator will give the audience ample time to identify the setting, before coming up with a twist - otherwise it's not the same effect, but something more akin to a cynical or otherwise moody introduction (an example of such a non-twist, because it happens already in the prologue of a story, would be Level's very nice short story about a bank employee who is presented as very good and thorough in his job and a model employee, but soon we learn he stole money and then did surrender to the authorities and admit he stole the money but also lied that he lost it by being himself robbed later on. In reality he entrusted it somewhere, with the plan to get it after he would be released from serving a few years in jail). So one parameter would be time given before a twist, if it's intended to be such.

Another parameter is whether the twist is discussed to any degree in the story, prior to happening - that is to say, if the reader is given reason to suspect something may be different than presented. A good example of that would be Tanizaki's tale about a student at whose dorm some objects have gone missing, and there is a mystery as to who stole them. The student (the text is in the first person narrative) goes into length examining who could be the thief (but later he tells us that he is the one). So this is a case of a twist which potentially could be foreseen since its subject is at the very forefront of the tale.

For an example of a work where the twist is simply not discussed at all, and nothing prepares for it, I always think of Lovecraft's The Outsider. Because there we as readers simply never have any reason to suspect

Spoiler

that the protagonist, his vast castle and the dark forest around it, all exist hundreds of meters below the ground...

[close]

Of course this type of twist is form-wise the safest. You can't look for something, when you are unaware that it even exists.


There are various hybrids. Agatha Christie's plots are typical of a subcategory of hybrid twist which is both discussed and we are given specific reason to look away from the direction the answer is - she usually achieves that by providing a seemingly more than adequate reason for the reader to identify the guilty character as innocent (eg by placing the murder in a location which brings other suspicions, or using doubles). Another hybrid is common in works by ETA Hofmann (such as The Sandman), where instead of having other characters being antagonistic as to the guilt, they just overshadow the chosen to be revealed as wondrous, by being presented themselves as mysterious and even possibly supernatural (eg while we focus on the titular character of The Sandman, who may be anything up to a flying monster,

Spoiler

we may not notice that much of worth in a rather stiff girl by the name of Olympia, but later on she is revealed to be an automaton.

[close]

Ok, after this very brief mention of a few of the types, feel free to suggest your own favorite twists in literary stories.



Ps: you can mention Shyamalan, if you absolutely have to   Personally I only find the twist in I See Dead People as being of note. Of course he didn't help himself by (after his second movie) making people expect every single project of his to have a twist.

That said, the twist in ISDP is part of the group where the reveal changes a significant part of the meaning of the story. This often happens in Philip Dick's works, although there it is based on tech that makes the distinction between reality and hallucination difficult to pin down (as in Ubiq, but most of his other novels too).

May we all have fun 

For a game with so much style - and interesting symbols, for example an iron helmet that has the eyes covered with hands, or The Turned Throne - I was personally let down by the story-change they made in the closing dlc. The video is about that change:

I think the story was better before, and it may have been too hasty to leave behind before the next game. Without spoiling things, it's not a good idea to reduce the main antagonist, and that's even if you aim to make them a nested figure in your next game in some way; I think that in this type of setting you do require a respectable main antagonist and not one which is reduced to just another target.
Then again, Blasphemous is an action game, mechanics-wise; for that it is the norm to reduce the archenemy to another target of the heroes. But to me it went against the atmosphere built in the previous versions.

Hey
Listen, I will be immediately noting that up to now I never used any function in AGS - by which I mean nothing that wasn't composed of the basic elements used without formatting them explicitly as a "function".
But I had a game idea, and it would require answering correctly some stuff which (ultimately; it won't be phrased as such) are graphs of functions-related. Intersecting point(s) of two graphs is one of them.
And because a) I am not familiar with the AGS function-writing system, and b) it would really suck if I didn't at least ask for something specific, let's ask how you would write a function for the following:

Check if the numerical input (corresponds to coordinates x,y) is correct for the point where f(x)=ax^2+c and f(x)=b(ax)+d intersect (if needed, the constants can be removed, and I don't mind a single-digit limitation on the (integer anyway) coefficients either; nor do I care for larger exponents than 2)

I think he will. He is really the last person who should have been allowed to buy Twitter - so you can also thank (apart from Musk's ridiculous recklessness) the greedy Twitter previous owners who couldn't resist selling.

In general I avoid them, because the plots in most of them just aren't realistic and so wouldn't play out that way irl. A good example of that would be, imo, Columbo.



(that's Johnny Cash, by the way)

While Falk is a very sympathetic character, the plots in Columbo tend to be resting on convenient errors and are rather forced. That's certainly not only a trait of Columbo, which at least has redeeming elements (tone, entertainment value), for example it is much worse in that Mentalist tv series where (in my impression) really everything is artificial.

I found that some of Agatha Christie's works are a little more serious and believable, though even in her case (despite the higher level when compared to tv writers) convenience and forced action/mistakes also exist. It's just that those coexist with good ideas for diversions/misleading of the police, which might actually work, so are more authentic in that sense.

Anyway, enough with the intro If you have any suggestions for good detective shows, I am interested to read!

Just a thread for posting funny pics.