#Video Game Science

[hyruviandoctor]

New video is live now!

This is a series I've been wanting to start for a while now, and I finally got the guts to put it out there! If you like video games and are curious about the space science in them, please check it out and subscribe to keep up with the series! If you have

[throwsahammer]

One time, I decided to conduct an extremely scientific study of which Pokémon was the dumbest, as measured by how long they would stick around and let me keep throwing rocks at them in the safari zone. I would wander around and exclusively throw rocks at every wild Pokémon that appeared until they left, and then tally up my findings. I would use the dumbest representative for each Pokémon that I encountered, as I didn't really have a good way of gathering a good sample size for the rarer ones. While Slowpoke secured an early lead (9 rocks), I eventually found a really dumb Psyduck (11 rocks) that was the reigning champion for most of the experiment. Pretty much everyone was leaving after two or three good hits, so I was pleasantly surprised to crack double-digits with a particularly stubborn Exeggcute. My surprise soon turned into stupefied disbelief as the little clutch of eggs proceeded to take rock after rock unflinchingly to the face. After 12 throws I began to fear that I would kill the test subject before it fled. Finally, after 15 rocks, the world's dumbest Exeggcute realized it could end this nightmare and left me, troubled and sore-armed, to contemplate my life choices.

I thought that would be the end of it, but then I remembered that I hadn't yet used a fishing rod and proceeded to hook a Magikarp. Reader, words cannot describe the horror and elation I experienced as I proceeded to throw 23 rocks directly into that poor bastard's stupid face. At around the 20 rock mark I became extremely worried that Magikarp couldn't physically escape, and that the two of us would be stuck there forever. After that final excruciating ordeal I called off the experiment on ethical grounds and declared Magikarp the dumbest Pokémon.

[auravulpes]

On the Physical Characteristics of Teyvat

Okay, are you ready for some maths? No? Don't worry! It's basic stuff. I won't torture you too much with the details. Besides, I've learned things about Teyvat that I want to share! Let's just get on with this!

So, my first area of inquiry was, assuming a spherical Teyvat, how big is it actually? I mean, you'd think it was massive, given how far you can see, but is it really? So, I started here.

"But Aura," I hear you ask, "How will you figure out the size of something we don't even have all of yet?" Good question! We'll do it the way Eratosthenes did back in ancient Greece. Yeah, you know that whole thing about how the ancients were stupid and thought the Earth was flat? Yeah, no, multiple ancient societies knew the Earth was round and how big it was to a pretty astonishing degree of accuracy. Today, we follow in their footsteps!

What Eratosthenes did was take a stick that he knew how large it was and go to two different cities along the same meridian. From there, by taking a measurement of its shadow at the same time on the same day, you could work out the difference in angle between the two sticks and the sun's ray, which we can reasonably treat as being parallel due to the distance they travel and the small target they hit. By doing that, as long as you know the distance between the two cities, you could work out the Earth's circumference.

So, how does this work on Teyvat? Well, first, we need two points to measure from. I chose one in Liyue Harbor and one in Guili Plain directly north of the first. I then took a stick of known length, or, as his friends call him, Aether, and took a picture of him and his shadow at the same time. Now, same day of the year would be a bit tricky, but given that Teyvat doesn't seem to actually have seasons, we'll assume 0° of axial tilt, so it ultimately doesn't matter as long as we do the same time, which I chose as noon.

Now, we just need those actual measurements. The easy one is Aether. I'm assuming he's approximately 160 cm tall, give or take. That also allows me to, using some pixel measurements, get the length of his shadow. In Guili Plain, it was 36.3 cm, and in Liyue Harbor, it was 42.1 cm. Now, we just need the distance between the two points. That was a bit tricky. Unfortunately, the game doesn't show distance to a pin you've put down (at least, not that I'm aware). It does, however, show distance to quests, and conveniently, I've not bothered doing Windtrace! From our point in Liyue Harbor to Windtrace was 3101 m. By then stitching some map together in Photoshop, I got that the map at the scale I was using was at 8242.956:1 scale, or about 824 meters per centimeter on the map. I could then measure between my points to find a distance between the two points of approximately 1.04 kilometers.

Okay, we have what we need. First, we do some rudimentary trig to find the angles between our stick and the incoming rays of sun. In Guili Plain, this was 12.78°, and in Liyue Harbor, it was 14.74°. This gives a difference between the two angles of about 2°. This means these two points are about 2° apart on the circumpolar circumference of Teyvat. So, by multiplying our 1.04 kilometers by the 180 of those distances it would take to make a full circle around Teyvat, we get a circumference of 187.2 km! From there, with some simple geometry, we get a radius of 29.79 km, a surface area of 11,151 km², and a volume of about 111 km³.

(By the way, if you're upset about me referring to Aether as "our stick" throughout this first section, just keep reading to see what else I put him through!)

I then decided to take a little detour to figuring out how that would affect curvature. So, each kilometer around the surface is about 0.036 radians (around 2°). By using this, we can find how much drop off there should be. So, I started with the drop off between Qingyun Peak and Mount Yougou. So, some more stitching map screenshots together and we get a distance of about 6.8 kilometers. Using some simple trig, we find we should get a drop off of about 770 m. Dang. But, Qingyun Peak is pretty high up. What about from Liyue Harbor? Well, the distance from Liyue Harbor to Mount Yougou is about 5 kilometers, which would give about 421 meters of drop off. Hmm. Now that's a problem. See, if you actually go to Liyue Harbor and look towards Inazuma, you will see, well, pretty much all of it. It's hard to tell if the coastline is there, but if it isn't, it's only barely below the horizon, and it may just be hidden behind fog. That's not good. Maybe Teyvat is flat? Eh. Let's just keep going, shall we?

Next, I set out to find the acceleration due to gravity on Teyvat. Unfortunately, I needed to drop something and see how long it took to fall, and, well, Aether was right there...

So, I took him up to the top of the Venti statue to set up the drop. I once again needed distances, so I made use of the Windtrace quest once more. I then glided directly above the Windtrace guy and...set Aether plummeting to his death. It's fine. It was in the name of science after all. So, from 35 meters, it took Aether no more than 2.5 seconds. I'll admit, I screwed my timing up a little, so this is actually a lower bound on Teyvatian gravity rather than an exact figure, but it's still interesting. So, 2.5 seconds to fall 35 meters. Some relatively simple kinematics later, and we get an acceleration due to gravity of 12.8 m/s². Now, the equation I used has time squared on bottom, so the smaller the time it takes, the higher the figure you actually get for gravity. Thus, gravity is at least 12.8 m/s², and if I was off by a half a second, you'd find a gravity of around twice Earth's at 19.5 m/s².

Anyways, now that I'm done torturing Aether (it's okay, I kin him), we can figure out the mass of Teyvat. So, using our 12.8 m/s² figure, we can use some slightly more advance kinematics to figure out the mass of Teyvat, and we get a figure of around 1.7×10^20 kilograms. For context, Earth's mass is on the order of 10^24 kilograms and the moon's mass is on the order of 10^22 kilograms, so Teyvat is around 100 times less massive than the moon and 10,000 times less massive than Earth. It's small.

But, now, my friends, we get to the best part. What is the density of Teyvat? It's at this point we learn that either I fucked up somewhere or Teyvat is flat and all this math is invalid, because, get this, when you calculate out the density of Teyvat, you get a figure of 1.5 kg/cm². Not grams per cubic centimeter, not kilograms per cubic meter. 1.5 kilograms per cubic centimeter. For context, the Earth has a density of about 5 grams per cubic centimeter, three whole orders of magnitude less than Teyvat! So, either Teyvat has some really dense insides and a relatively not dense outside, or else I really feel sorry for the miners of Teyvat. I mean, imagine, you've got a minecart with less than a cubic meter of rock in it that weighs literal metric tons! It's absurd!

So, what have we learned? Well, either Teyvat is a super dense planetoid with some weird atmospheric refraction, or, else, I'm an idiot who just tried to apply a university-level understanding of physics and geology to a fictional game set on a generic flat plane without any regard to planetary geometry. But, honestly, who could really say which it is?

If you're curious, here's the images I used for the circumference calculations and the full stitched together map I used for distance measurements.

And here's the actual math. If you want me to go more in to it, let me know. I might. I may also try to actually work out the weird atmospheric refraction I referenced.

[prokopetz]

Wrong: Ada Lovelace invented computer science and immediately tried to use it to cheat at gambling because she was Lord Byron's daughter.

Right: Ada Lovelace invented computer science and immediately tried to use it to cheat at gambling because that was the closest you could get in 1850 to being a Super Mario 64 speedrunner.

[dianenguyenwatchescartoons]

[koyoriin]

"for all of my life, a stranger i remain"

https://twitter.com/koyoriin https://patreon.com/koyorin https://instagram.com/koyori_n https://bsky.app/profile/koyorin.bsky.social

[retrogamingblog2]

[vgadvisor]

[milkywayes]

The reality was as cold and disillusioning as the rain.

a big thank you to @that-wildwolf for commissioning me to capture this emotional scene from Edge of Yesterday!

[undertalethingems]

Unexpected Guests Chapter 10, Act Two: Page 6

First / Previous / Next

Out of sight doesn't mean out of mind.... Gaster won't let anything interfere with his goal.

Look for the next update on Nov. 16th!

[ilikedetectives]

[throwsahammer]

Back when I worked the night shift in-office, the lads and I would constantly be on the lookout for internet content to keep ourselves entertained. This culminated in my buddy and I playing Oregon Trail Deluxe via the Internet Archive and getting into increasingly bizarre competitions. We initially started out with a simple race to the finish, but after a while, we were regularly trying to see who could have everyone in their wagon die of the same illness or seeing who could complete a run with the least amount of starting equipment. We'd see who could survive the longest off of a single bullet with no trading, or who could ford the most rivers with at least one survivor.

With all that in mind, it may come as a shock to you that by far, the wackiest competitions were the ones where we were trying to go for high scores. For those unfamiliar, the Deluxe edition of Oregon Trail would award you points at the end of a successful run for everything you had on you, including surviving party members, oxen, sets of extra clothing, leftover supplies, and cash. If you played the game as intended, you would typically have to make strategic decisions about whether to spend your meager starting funds on essentials or on score-enhancing items.

We were most definitely not playing the game as intended, and by that, I mean we were abusing the absolute shit out of the game's broken trading mechanic. See, instead of engaging with the game's actual economy, you could simply keep inputting a desired item and pressing a button until someone offered you a favorable trade. If you knew what you were doing, you could stretch your starting funds to a ridiculous degree, or even (slowly) generate infinite wealth. The game had hard limits on how many of a specific item you could actually have at a time, so usually, these runs would consist of trading in Independence until you had a full team of oxen and enough supplies to make the trek a cakewalk, traveling to just outside of the Willamette Valley, and then trading until you got tired and decided to just end it, which made Oregon Trail Deluxe high score competitions into tests of physical endurance.

I learned a lot about the game's underlying systems during this time and realized that I needed to test its limits via the ultimate test: could I have an entire wagon die of old age before ever even leaving Independence?

I quickly set to work, repeatedly swindling the locals out of the same ox and set of clothes in order to make enough money to buy food. Due to the fact that we weren't moving at all, I was able to set rations to bare bones, as the health penalty from starvation was almost entirely offset by the bonus from resting. I settled in for the long haul, resting for 9-day chunks of time (the most days it will allow you to rest in one go) and only interrupting the hibernation to trade whenever food stocks got low. Every few months, I would set rations to full for a few days to replenish everyone's health to the maximum before returning to the usual routine of slowly starving to death in a wagon on the outskirts of the city.

I kept this up for an ungodly amount of time. Years passed. I eventually did some googling and made the horrible discovery that there is no such thing as death by old age in Oregon Trail Deluxe, but by then, the challenge had already transcended its original concept entirely. I no longer wished death upon my little party of immoral wagon-dwelling scam artists, and instead decided to just see how long I could keep their little routine going. I set a soft goal of making it to 1948, a full century after the initial expedition's "departure". Alas, it was not meant to be. I only made it to the 1880s when a companywide hardware update erased all of my stagnant progress. I told myself that I would resume the experiment at some point, but I never did.

[rivensbane]

CROW in DESTINY 2: SEASON OF THE WISH.

[prokopetz]

Conspicuous phenotypic similarities among characters like Astarion (Baldur's Gate 3, 2023) and Preminger (Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper, 2004) have been noted in the past; however, establishment of a definitive taxonomy has thus far been hindered by the fact that both are clearly juveniles of their species. Now, however, a mature specimen is believed to have been located:

[akeussel]

[koyoriin]

NACHTREIHER // ARMORED CORE VI

https://twitter.com/koyoriin https://patreon.com/koyorin https://instagram.com/koyori_n https://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id