#and took it as a sign that it's time to officially implement that tag on my own blog

[markantonys]

slowly but surely, the gawynposting campaign is bearing fruit!

[crazy-loca-blog]

Casey Valentine: About Her Future

A/N: This has been one hell of a ride! Talking about Casey and her life has been an amazing experience. There are many situations about her future that I haven't figured out yet, that's why I'm keeping things in a very limited timeframe (around 2 and maybe 3 years after the end of her residency). Thanks a lot to @openheartfanfics for organizing this event. I've had a blast!

Meet My MC || About Her Past || About Her Present

Casey has been leading the diagnostics team for over two years now. And things have changed a lot.

As soon as she assumed her new role, she was determined to make the team the core of a system that also involves the rest of the departments at Edenbrook. And she uses her friends for it.

Casey, Ines and Jackie are implementing a special program to evaluate interns and residents in order to discover outstanding doctors that may support the diagnostics team and other areas in the hospital after their boards. It follows a lot of the guidelines that Ethan used when they were interns, but it also gives selected residents an opportunity to assist the diagnostics team in some cases in order to improve their skills.

Elijah and Zaid became her go-to people when it comes to studies and reseach, especially in those cases where experimental treatments are the only option for patients.

Sienna quickly became a team favorite. As the best pediatrician at Edenbrook, every time the team receives a pediatric case, she is involved in the course of treatment of the patient. Casey is considering to offer her a permanent spot in the team.

Bryce's research skills when it comes to evaluate surgical options for patients are brilliant, so he frequently helps Harper by giving her second opinions on certain procedures. He also covers for her as member of the diagnostics team every time she's on leave.

When a patient needs rehab after some surgery, Rafael is the one in charge of the process. The results his patients achieve in their recovery are proof that he has all the profesionalism, the patience and the work ethics the team needs in their collaborators.

As per Baz and Ethan, Casey convinced them to keep collaborating with the team on an ocassional basis. They are one of the best immunologists and the best diagnostician in the country, so she needs their brains in her team, even if it's not permanently. They assist in the hardest and most enigmatic cases.

Despite all their efforts, the team can't accept every case they receive. And that's when Kenmore help is appreciated. A year ago, Tobias, Casey and Aurora developed a collaboration project between the diagnostics teams of both hospitals, which now allows both Edenbrook and Kenmore to help twice the amount of people they used to assist when they worked separately.

Of course, none of this would be possible without Ethan's help. As Chief of Medicine, he has the power to approve most of Casey's projects, so he's been making a very good use of a position that he wasn't convinced to accept at first. It's definitely been a win-win situation when it comes to team work between Dr. Ramsey and Dr. Valentine.

Despite of them being very private when it comes to their personal lives, there is no doubt that Casey and Ethan are relationship goals. If seeing them working together in the past was a delight, the way they've been ruling Edenbrook after becoming official has certainly helped them become the power couple the hospital needed.

Because you can definitely tell they're not only great partners, but also each other's best friend. Their nonverbal communication skills are at a whole different level and they certainly boost each other in a way you can tell they're the best thing that has ever happened to the other. They're in love and it shows.

That's why no one was surprised when, after 8 months of becoming official, they decided to move in together.

But everybody was surprised when Ethan proposed only a few months afterwards. Except for his dad and her brother (who were the only people who knew about his plans), literally no one saw it coming, not even Casey (because yes, Ethan has mastered the art of surprising her).

They almost canceled the wedding... twice. The stress of their jobs plus the chaos that involves planning a wedding was beginning to affect their wellbeing as individuals. It wasn't a big issue for any of them: Casey never cared about having a ring on her finger and they both knew that nothing about their relationship would change if they didn't sign a piece of paper, as they were certain they had sealed the deal a long time ago.

The thought of an elopement also crossed their minds... and right when they were about to do it, Sienna came up with a brilliant idea to save their original plan: a micro wedding, that took place 6 months ago.

These newlyweds like saying they have a family of four: Ethan's dad and Casey's brother are pretty much the only relatives they have, so they consider them part of their household. They even have their own rooms in their new home in Boston!

They'd both agree that getting used to wear a ring has probably been the hardest part of their marriage, even when they cared about buying bands that were "compatible" with their jobs. But they are pretty sure that if they take it off, they'll end up losing it, so they kind of gave up. They expect to get used to it over time.

When they're not at work, they love exploring all the hidden gems that Boston has to offer. They've found a bunch of great places thanks to Rafael's recommendations, but they have also discovered a lot of new places by themselves. That doesn't mean they don't enjoy a good date at home after an exhausting day at work or getting lost and disconnecting from the world for a full weekend without telling anyone where they are.

This philosophy of discovering new places also applies to their holidays. Sometimes they'd go to well-known places, but they both agree that their favorite trips are those where they visit underrated destinations. Of course, they also leave a few days to visit Alan in Providence and to go to Casey's home in Virginia.

Kids? They have talked about it, but they don't feel ready to take that step yet. Not only their jobs are very demanding, they both have some baggage they need to get rid of before thinking about becoming parents. They're not in a hurry though, they're convinced that everything happens for a reason... they are happy, and that's all that matters.

She may not live with them anymore, but the roomies (and the rest of the gang) are still incredibly close. Casey still has lunch with whoever is available almost every day, and they still have a booth with their names on it at Donahue's.

When Casey moved in with Ethan, they didn't search for a new roomie. With the exception of Sienna, they all were attendings, so it was easier for them fo afford Casey's part ot the rent. They decided to turn her room into an office they all use a lot.

And none of them has the intention to leave their apartment any time soon. Housing in Boston is incredibly expensive, and they know none of them could afford a place like the one they have by themselves. This also gives them a chance to get rid of their med school debt a little faster.

Jackie, Aurora, Sienna and Casey also host a "girls just want to have fun" event at the apartment whenever Elijah visits his parents. It's a bonding tradition they started during their residency and they have no intention to finish any time soon. Sometimes, Kyra (when she is in town), Ines and Angie join them as well.

Bryce is the person she relies on when she needs a brotherly figure. She can definitely see a lot of her brother on him, and he always seem to have the right answer to everything. He also had to get a bigger place, as Keiki returned to Boston after being accepted at Harvard. Casey and Jackie guided her to attend med school... and convinced her to become a diagnostician.

The gang never knows when Kyra is going to make some surprise visit. She's been travelling around the world for a long time now, but she's been back home a few times for special ocasions. The last time they saw her was for Casey and Ethan's wedding.

Sienna and Casey have been exchanging recipes for a while now. Casey can cook to survive, but Ethan takes cooking to a whole new level, so Sienna usually comes to the rescue when her bestie needs help.

Casey is also playing matchmaker between Sienna and Rafael. She has been observing the way they look at each other for a while, and she's convinced they would make the cutest couple ever. Because beautiful souls deserve to be together. So yeah, she most definitely will introduce Sienna and Rafael's vovo very soon with some "help me cook dinner" excuse.

Tags: @adiehardfan @izzyourresidentlawyer

[phgq]

Multi-sector peaceably launches Yes for Peace on Int’l Human Rights Day

#PHinfo: Multi-sector peaceably launches Yes for Peace on Int’l Human Rights Day

Yes for Peace holds peace and human rights-oriented event kickoff in front of the UP Carillon Tower in Diliman, Quezon City (Photo courtesy of Mr. Ernesto A. Alcanzare)

CALOOCAN CITY, Dec. 13 (PIA) -- Following strict health protocols set by the World Health Organization, representatives of various sectors had peaceably assembled on International Human Rights Day to officially launch the historic Yes for Peace-Bayanihan ng Bayan para sa Kapayapaan, Kaunlaran at Kasaganaan at the Andres Bonifacio Centennial Carillon Tower located in the Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines system.

The kickoff, a stark contrast amid the reportedly dwindling noisy and insolent protests and marches of anti-government forces to commemorate the global human rights event on Dec. 10, calmly called for the promotion of peacebuilding efforts, such as answering the Yes for Peace questionnaire to boost peace education, asserting the right to peace, and calling for an end to all armed conflicts in the country.

In his speech, Commissioner Yusoph Mando of the National Commission on Muslim Filipinos (NCMF) said, “Unfortunately, peacebuilding is still not the default response to conflict.”

“We need everybody’s help to tell others about how we can tackle conflict and end violence,” Mando added. 

For his part, Cosanie Derogongan, Director of the Bureau of Peace and Conflict Resolution (BPCR) of the NMCF said, “We believe that we can achieve a just, comprehensive, unifying and sustainable peace without destruction to property and deaths, including unarmed civilians.”

“The armed conflicts can only be stopped if the will of the people can verifiably be documented through the people’s referendum component of Yes for Peace to debunk the self-declaration of armed rebels that they are fighting for the rights and interests of the people,” Derogongan added.

In his message, Undersecretary Severo S. Catura, Executive Director of the Presidential Human Rights Committee (PHRC) underscored, “Peace is a human right, even as a society that is at peace is its ultimate aim.”

“There can never be real, tangible and felt development without making our people feel secure and it is our duty to uplift the people’s welfare,” Catura quoted a statement made by President Rodrigo Roa Duterte during the first State of the Nation Address (SONA).

Catura, who started his career at the Office of the Peace Commissioner (OPC) which eventually became the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (OPAPP) recalled, “This campaign is already more than thirty years old.  We remain steadfast and firm in supporting its call because the advocacy of our office is for each individual to have the right to peace.”

Red tagging

After careful deliberation and negotiations with UP Diliman Chancellor Fidel Nemenzo and Vice-Chancellor for Community Affairs Aleli B. Bawagan, the kick-off activity inside the UP Diliman campus was approved dispelling some allegations that UP is anti-government and will not permit non-leftists to openly express their advocacies inside the campus.

The full support of the university was felt by event organizers.  Personnel from its Community Maintenance Office prepared the venue while the management of the UP Theater readily provided electrical power for the sounds and lights used in the event.  Normal fees for rental and electrical consumption were likewise waived.

Alpha Dasmarinas, Chief Financial Officer of Yes for Peace, Incorporated was elated, “Thank you UP for the full support that you have given to for this simple kick-off event.”

“May you continue to support our campaign and take is as your own in the days to come pursuant to your Board of Regents Resolution offering UP as venue and as mediating institution during its 1056th meeting,” Dasmarinas said in gratitude.

Asked by the PIA-NCR, Ernesto Angeles Alcanzare, lead organizer of Yes for Peace–Bayanihan ng Bayan and Chief Executive Officer of Yes for Peace Incorporated said, "Curiously, some well-meaning, but obviously misinformed supporters of the Duterte administration have reportedly red-tagged Yes for Peace over various social media platforms simply because it decided to use the color red as the background of its propaganda tarpaulins and because they allowed the UP Community to display the messages 'Defend Academic Freedom' and 'No to Red-Tagging'."

He explained, “The use of gold on red in our campaign tarpaulins is based on the Chinese belief that these colors bring fortune and good luck especially during events such as these.  After all, the use of these colors is not exclusive to the communists.”

“As for the tarpaulins of the UP Community, these are commonly held beliefs among constituents, including its alumni to which I belong.  Red-tagging the whole university because of a very noisy albeit small minority is unfair,” he lamented.

“Moreover, who can in his right mind refuse a very gracious host to post a commonly held message in your event even if it seems to have taken the scene away from the central messages of one’s event?” he added.

Alcanzare said it is in this light that he appreciated the wisdom of President Duterte who saw all through the non-partisan and inclusive nature of Yes for Peace when he wrote in his message, “I recognize this noble undertaking of Yes for Peace–Bayanihan ng Bayan because it promotes a newfound culture of harmony and cooperation among our communities…  I am amazed how anybody can be so bigoted and narrow-minded to accuse and judge Yes for Peace as part of the over-all plan to destabilize and bring down the government.”

“Please let me take this opportunity to inform all those who have jumped the gun to unfairly accuse us of being leftists that we categorically but respectfully denied the display of a red tarp bearing the message ‘ABOLISH NTF-ELCAC’,” Alcanzare said of a group handing them a prepared banner prior to the event launch.

“I am sure that had we allowed them to do their bidding, they would have joined us and trebled the number of participants,” he said, “Actually, they conducted a rally right across the street and waited for us to march to the Oblation Plaza, a thought that did not even cross our minds.”

For her part, Evelyn Canete Evangelio, National Executive Director of Alpha Phi Omega International Philippines Inc then suggested, “We might as well change the colors used in campaign tarpaulins to Blue and Gold to satisfy the call for blood by bashers who have displayed the propensity to accuse anybody of being a communist by sheer color of preference.”

“After all, APO is into this campaign pursuant to our founder’s vision for us to convince leaders of the world to resolve conflicts in a more humane and legal manner than by war,” Evangelio added.

For his part, Mama S. Lalanto, al Haj, Chairman of Yes for Peace, Incorporated and a past president of APO Phils declared, “The Yes for Peace is an inclusive campaign. We do not discriminate anybody by virtue of race, religion and political beliefs. This is reflected in our logo which bears the primary and secondary colors of the elementary color wheel.”

“Any color of preference by any donor is acceptable for as long as it is used in good faith and communicated to us prior to the production and distribution of the campaign materials,” Lalanto emphasized.

To recall, the The Yes for Peace–Bayanihan ng Bayan para sa Kapayapaan, Kaunlaran at Kasaganaan, a multi-sectoral peace and development campaign was incorporated into the Sectoral Unification, Capability Building and Mobilization (SUCBEM) cluster of the National Action Plan of the National Task Force to End the Local Communist Armed Conflicts (NTF ELCAC) submitted by National Security Adviser Secretary Hermogenes C. Esperon, Jr. and approved by President Duterte in 2019.

However, upon the advice of Esperon, the campaign design was refined, per the approved plan by the Yes for Peace, Incorporated, which was registered with the Securities and Exchange to give a juridical identity to empower the proponents to enter into agreements with government institutions and non-government organizations for the transparent implementation of the campaign.

The consultation and refinement process were made parallel to the preparations of the whole-of-government to get all agencies on board in the good governance pillar of NTF-ELCAC. The process took over one year.

Prior to the issuance of EO No. 70 by Duterte, Yes for Peace was calling “Resume Peace Talks Here” in contrast to the insistence of left-leaning forces that were shouting “Resume Peace Talks” even as the President was trying to convince communist leader Jose Ma. Sison to come home to the Philippines so that peace talks to resume.

Unfortunately, Sison who initiated the armed revolution and protracted war to bring down the government vehemently refused citing concerns for his life and security.  On record, Sison has been blaming Duterte for killing the peace talks.

“Had the peace talks resumed with UP as venue and mediating institution, could the final peace agreement have been crafted and signed within three months which was the time frame declared by Joma Sison?” Alcanzare asked.

With the inevitable and final collapse of the peace talks because of Sison’s refusal to give in to the President’s firm and unmovable position that it be held here, Yes for Peace searched for cost-effective and resource-efficient means to document the Filipino people’s consensus on the three calls of the campaign. (PIA NCR)

***

References:

* Philippine Information Agency. "Multi-sector peaceably launches Yes for Peace on Int’l Human Rights Day." Philippine Information Agency. https://pia.gov.ph/news/articles/1061619 (accessed December 13, 2020 at 02:45PM UTC+08).

* Philippine Infornation Agency. "Multi-sector peaceably launches Yes for Peace on Int’l Human Rights Day." Archive Today. https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://pia.gov.ph/news/articles/1061619 (archived).

[purgefails]

One thing that annoys me about @staff is their total silence when faced with criticism

They only wrote a few standardized posts to introduce their ban, but never actually confronted the multiple problems of their flagging system, and the massive backlash from the community.

All we got was :

“yeah, we know you hate this term” in brackets about the “female presenting-nipples” bs... and that was all. The misogyny problem wasn’t even adressed, they’re not even TRYING to explain themselves and are downright being disdainful towards users

Ignoring or being disrespectul to your userbase doesn’t seem like a viable way of managing a website you want to monetize so badly. Like, i can understand the need to get rid of adult content to attract ad revenue, but why not take care of the remaining sfw communities then? Why not officially address problems by communicating more humanly with users?

Other companies did that in far better ways. For instance, when Snapchat implemented a new update back in early 2018, users were very angry, and just like we did, they created a petition in early February. It quickly gained a million signatures, and by Feb 20, Snapchat officially responded, and actually took users feelings and criticism into accounts:

To Nic [creator of the petition] and all the Snapchatters who signed this petition, we hear you, and appreciate that you took the time to let us know how you feel. We completely understand the new Snapchat has felt uncomfortable for many.

And then, they actually do try to EXPLAIN why they implemented this update. Granted, a single message isn’t much, but it is symbolically/morally important, because it shows you care for your userbase and that you’re willing to take criticism into account. And a few months later, a new update fixed most of the problems created by the former one (the petition is now marked as “victory“).

What will it take for Tumblr to take users criticism into account and finally answer us? Almost 600 000 people have signed the petition against the ban.

Do we need to reach 1 million as well to be heard?

@staff, if you ever decide to actually communicate with your userbase, here’s a list of problems for you to choose from:

numerous safe posts flagged

porn bots epidemic

more and more blogs being hacked and turned into porn blogs overnight

official ads validated by Tumblr still promoting adult (and often sexist) content

nazi and white supremacy blogs still running rampant

difficulties to make posts appear in tags

color change causing eyestrain and headache for multiple users

etc. etc.

[starcitizenprivateer]

Star Citizen Monthly Report: February 2019

February saw Cloud Imperium devs around the world working hard to deliver the incredible content for the soon-to-be-released Alpha 3.5 patch. Progress was made everywhere, from locations like ArcCorp to the gameplay developments afforded by the New Flight Model. Read on for the full lowdown from February’s global workload.

Star Citizen Monthly Report: February 2019

AI – Character

February’s roundup starts with the AI Team, who made improvements to the existing character collision avoidance system. The changes began with adjustments to the smooth locomotion path, with the data now coming from the collision avoidance calculation to make sure the character has enough free space.

Time was spent generalizing the options a vendor can use so that designers no longer have to write them into the behaviors. Instead, the correct options are automatically selected based on the environment and (eventually) from the shop services.

They’re also restricting combat behavior to allow better scalability when adding new tactics and are investigating some of the bugs found in the Alpha 3.4 release.

AI – Ships

Throughout February, the AI Team improved various aspects of dogfighting gameplay, including evasive maneuvers. Now, when an AI pilot has an enemy on its tail, it will try to utilize different break-aways with increasing and varied angles. It will also try to keep momentum and chain together attack maneuvers. To achieve this, the team exposed new ‘SmoothTurning’ subsumption tasks to the behavior logic.

When detecting enemy fire, AI pilots will utilize evasive maneuvers to create a diversion.

They also implemented automatic incoming/outgoing ship traffic over planetary landing areas. They are currently generalizing ship behaviors to enable the designers to easily set up traffic on multiple cities, capital ships, and so on.

Animation

Last month, Animation provided the remaining animation sets for previous characters already found in the Persistent Universe (PU), including Hurston, Battaglia, and Pacheco. They also finished off a new batch of animations for the ship dealer. Work continues on animations for future yet-to-be-announced characters too, which includes getting approval for the initial poses and animations before going forward with the final clean-up.

American Sign Language (ASL) emotes are being added to the game and are currently being improved with the addition of facial animations.

Finally, Animation is currently syncing with Cinematics for a few interesting segments that backers will get to enjoy soon…

Art – Tech

Tech Art invested significant effort into optimizing rig assets so that they work better with the facial runtime rig logic and the ‘look at’ and ‘mocap’ re-direction components. Since eye contact is one of the fundamental means of human communication, any error or tiny deviation can cause the ‘uncanny valley’ effect and immediately break immersion.

“If the eyes of an actor converge just slightly too much, they appear cross-eyed. However, if they don’t converge enough, they appear to look through you, as if distracted. If the eyelids occlude the character’s iris just a little too much, which, depending on the distance, could amount to just 2-3 pixels vertically, they look sleepy or bored. Conversely, if they expose too much of the cornea, they appear more alert, surprised, or outright creepy.”

So, the alignment of the virtual skeleton’s eye joints with respect to the eyeball and eyelid geometry is of utmost importance. Likewise, the ‘look-at’ system needs to control all relevant rig parameters and corrective blendshapes (not just the rotation of the eyeballs themselves) to create truly-believable runtime re-directions of the mocap animations.

Alongside facial work, the team completed several weapons-related tasks, such as fixing offsets during reload animations and locomotion issues for the pistol set. They also completed R&D related to playing animations in sync with character usables within cinematic scenes and helped Design to unify the character tags in Mannequin.

Art – Environment

Predictably, the Environment Team is racing towards the completion of ArcCorp and Area 18 – they’re currently working with and implementing the custom advertising provided by the UI department. The planet itself is in the final art stage and now includes skyscrapers rising above the no-fly zone to provide the player with landing opportunities and interesting buildings to fly around.

Concurrently, the ‘Hi-Tech’ common elements are steadily progressing, with the transit, habitation, and security areas all moving to the art pass stage. Players will see these common elements (alongside garages and hangars) when they’re added to microTech’s landing zone, New Babbage.

The new transit connection between Lorville’s Teasa spaceport and the Central Business District (CBD) is almost ready for travellers. This route will allow players to move directly between the two locations and bypass L19, cutting travel time for high-end shoppers.

Work on organics is ongoing, as are improvements to planet tech, with the artists hard at work creating a library of exotic-looking flora to fill the biomes of New Babbage with. Players can see it for themselves towards the end of the year.

The community can also look forward to upcoming information on the early work the team has done on procedural caves.

Audio

Both the Audio Code Team and the sound designers finished their work on the new camera-shake and ship-vibration systems. Now, when an engine kicks in, the ship shakes and hums. This also extends to the player, with events like a ship powering up causing minor camera shake.

The sound designers also added new sound samples to a range of ships as part of the rollout of the New Flight Model. By adding ‘one-shot’ samples to each of the various thrusters, they brought out more complexity in the sounds heard during flight.

The Audio Team spent the majority of the month creating the sounds of Area 18. Due to the melting pot of ideas and themes present in the new area, the sound designers tested new methods to bring out the unique atmosphere. Additionally, they created the sound profiles and samples for the Gemini S71 assault rifle and Kastak Arms CODA pistol, both of which will appear in the PU and SQ42.

Currently, the Audio Code Team is working towards an updated tool that better allows the sound designers to implement created assets in-engine whilst simultaneously testing how they sound.

Backend Services

Backend Services continued to lay the foundation for the new diffusion network to help scalability for the backend structure of the game. Emphasis is on ensuring the Dedicated Game Servers (DGS) correctly connect to the new diffusion services, particularly the variable, leaderboard, and account services.

February marked the near-end of work on the new Item Cache Service (a massive portion of the backend has now turned micro-service) and began the end-point between DGS and this service, too. As work is completed on the new diffusion services, testing will ensure a smooth transition to the new network.

Support was also added for subsumption services to read directly into the DataCore P4k system for increased efficiency and unification.

With the approaching publish of Alpha 3.5, Backend Services began work on logistics, syncing closely with DevOps to ensure that new services are up and running correctly while maintaining legacy services where necessary.

Community

The team celebrated Valentine’s Day with community-made cards and limited-time ship offers, including Anvil’s F7C-M Heartseeker – a special version of the Super Hornet shooting straight for the heart. During the Be my Valentine greeting card contest, most Citizens got creative with their favorite image editing software, though some went old-school with scissors and crayons to create fantastic crafts to share their love across the galaxy.

Also this month, Argo Astronautics released their latest addition to the ‘verse, the SRV. The ‘Standard Recovery Vehicle’ is built for tugging ships, ground vehicles, and massive cargo containers through the stars using its integrated tractor tech. If you’re looking for more information about this rough and rugged ship, head to the Q&A that answers questions voted-on by the community. As a bonus, Shipmaster General John Crewe stopped by Reverse the Verse LIVE for some in-depth tug-talk.

In the February issue of Jump Point (our subscriber-exclusive magazine), Ben Lesnick took a detailed dive into the ARGO SRV’s design process and went on a worker’s tour of Hurston. The Narrative Team also introduced us to the Human holiday Stella Fortuna and shed light on the history of the revered Rust Society.

A major update to the Star Citizen roadmap gave a look at what’s coming to the Persistent Universe in 2019 and what can be expected in upcoming releases.

Released in January, but worthy of another mention, is the official Star Citizen Fankit, which was put together to help all of you share your enthusiasm and engagement. Star Citizen lives by the support it receives from the community, so take a look at this treasure trove of assets and get creating!

The team is also excited to announce that our physical merchandise will soon be receiving a well-deserved face-lift. Having received a lot of feedback over the years, it’s clear that Citizens are passionate about merch and to make the store experience the best it can be, your input was needed. Thanks to everyone who contributed feedback to our thread on Spectrum!

Content – Characters

The Character Team revisited the hair development pipeline in February. With the help of the Graphics Team, they developed new tools and shader tech to improve the realism of hair while maintaining quality and performance. More work went into mission-giver Pacheco, including textures and rigging, with her hairstyle being used to trial the new hair pipeline. Work continues on the assets required for DNA implementation and the female player character, while refinement of the Xi’an concept is making great progress.

Design

Throughout February, Design focused on implementing Area 18’s shops, NPCs, and usables. Last month marked the end of implementation, with March being used for polish to ensure a believable and immersive experience upon release. The team also gained a new member to help with mission implementation and improvement, who is currently setting their sights on the Emergency Communication Network (ECN) mission set.

Regarding the economy, the US Design Team worked with their UK counterparts on the objective criteria and value of objects in-game, laying down the track for acquiring item properties and their values. A system was built to help create an abstract representation, which is both robust and modular enough to allow easy adjustment in the future when the details are finalized.

DevOps

DevOps had a busy month working on the build system and pipeline that supports feature stream development. After several long nights, they rolled out the upgrades and have been happy with the results so far – internal systems are running smoothly without errors and each evolution improves efficiency and storage consumption.

They’re now attempting to further compress existing data which, when multiplied by hundreds of thousands of individual files, will make a real impact to the dev’s daily development efforts.

Engineering

February saw the Engine Team spend time on general Alpha 3.5 support, such as profiling, optimization, and bug fixing. They also improved the instance system used in compute skinning and refactored it on the CPU and shader for better maintainability, created a budget-based output-buffer system for skinning results (so they only have to skin once per frame), made more tangent reconstruction optimizations, and worked on wrap-deformation using the color stream.

Basic HDR display support was added to the editor, as was a new hue-preserving display mapping curve suitable for HDR display output. The team provided material layer support for planet tech v4 and continued to improve character hair, which included initial hair mask, support for edge masking, and pixel depth offset. Game physics is progressing with Projectile Manager 2.0, as well as optimizations to wrapped grids and state updates. Support was added for ocean Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) wave generation to physics buoyancy calculations, as well as exposed optimized terrain meshes.

A major system initialization clean-up was completed as part of an initiative to share core engine functionality with PU services, work began on the lockless job manager (a complete overhaul for faster response in high-load scenarios), and a new load time profiler was created. The team are currently wrapping up the ‘ImGUI’ integration and introducing a temporary allocator for more efficiency when containers are used on stack.

They made the switch to the Clang 6 compiler to build Linux targets (including compilation cleanup of the entire code base) and plan to switch to the latest stable release (Clang 8.x) in the near future.

Finally, they finished a ‘create compile time’ analysis tool (utilizing new Visual C++ front and backend profiler flags) to gather, condense, and visualize reasons for slow compile and link times. As a result, various improvements have already been submitted and further action-items defined.

Features – Gameplay

A large portion of Gameplay Feature’s month was dedicated to implementing the new DNA feature into the character customizer. In addition, the team was responsible for creating and setting up the user interface (UI) and accommodating the female playable character, both of which are scheduled for Alpha 3.5.

Another major focus was on video streaming for comms calls, which consisted of a refactor of the comms component to utilize the voice service call mechanism. Research was made into the VP9 streaming format and video streaming improvements were completed that will be rolled out in the upcoming release.

Lastly, support was given to the US-based Vehicle Features Team, with updates to the turret sensitivity HUD, gimbal assist UI, and the shopping service entity registration.

Features – Vehicles

Gimbal Assist and its related HUD improvements were finalized and polished, allowing for better balancing of this new weapon control scheme. Turrets were also improved, as the team added a HUD and keybinds for input sensitivity, implemented adjustable speeds for gimbal target movement based on proximity to center aim, and fixed bugs with snapping and erratic movement.

A lot of work went into scanning improvements, which included adjusting the area for navpoint scanning, enabling use of the navpoint hierarchy, and adding a Boolean to opt into the scanning data. This endeavor also covered adjustments to make scanning more involving by setting up AI turrets to generate signatures and be scannable and adding specific icons for scanned/unscanned targets. Ping and blob were implemented to display on the radar too, including focus angle and ping fire.

To round out the month, they continuing to make item port tech optimizations, developed tech for utilizing geometry component tags in the paint system, and fixed a handful of crash bugs.

Graphics

Last month, the Graphics Team’s work on the PU was spread between several smaller tasks. There were many shader requests from the artists, such as adding new features to the hard surface shader and ISO support for decals in the forward rendering pipeline.

The team also continued with the CPU optimizations from last month. This included a 3x performance saving on the cost of building per-instance data buffers for the GPU and better support for the depth pre-pass to help occlude hidden parts of the frame with less CPU overheads.

To help the artists optimize their content, the team worked on an improved render-debugging tool that reports how many draw instructions (draw-call) a particular object requires along with a breakdown of why each instruction was needed. Once complete, this will allow the artists to dig into their material and mesh setups to save valuable CPU time.

Level Design

The Level Design Team soldiered on with ArcCorp’s Area 18, bringing the designer whitebox up to greybox. They began planning the modular space stations that will be built this year too, including looking at the libraries, rooms, and content that goes into them. The procedural tool is also now at a stage where they can slowly start ramping up the modular station production.

Live Design

The Live Team refactored existing missions to make them scalable to make more content available in the planetary system (other than Crusader). Significant progress was made on a new drug-stealing mission for Twitch Pacheco, as well as a BlackJack Security counter-mission that tasks less morally-corrupt players with destroying the stash.

Another focus was on implementing a variety of encounters with security forces and bounty hunters when the player holds a high crime stat.

As well as practical work, time was taken to define the next tier of many aspects of the law system, such as punishment, paying fines, bounty hunting, and so on.

Lighting

Last month, the Lighting Team focused on developing the look of Area 18. Lighting Area 18 is a mixture of clean-up work from the previous versions to match new standards and lighting the new exterior layout to a series of targets set by the Art Director. The team is working closely with the Environment Art and VFX teams to ensure that new advertising assets and visual effects ‘pop’ from the environment and provide interesting and varied visuals.

Narrative

Working closely with the Environment Art and Mission Design teams, February saw the Narrative Team further fleshing out of lore relating to ArcCorp and its moons. From new mission giver contract text to the catchy slogans gracing Area 18’s numerous billboards, a lot of additional lore was created to bring these locations to life.

Additionally, expanded wildline sets for security pilots, bounty hunters, and combat assist pilots were scripted and recorded. The AI and Mission teams will use these sets to begin prototyping and testing out new gameplay for inclusion in future builds.

Also, the Narrative Team made progress on generating the specific text needed for on-screen mission objectives. Currently, this is placeholder text from the designers who worked on levels, but moving forward, the hope is to begin using the proper in-lore objectives.

Player Relations

The Player Relations Team was busy preparing for Alpha 3.5 (including getting ready to test the New Flight Model) as well as boxing off the work created over the holiday period.

“As always, we’d like to point all players to our growing Knowledge Base, which now has 120+ articles and saw almost 450,000 visitors this month! We will continue to grow this by adding more ‘How To’ articles, patch notes, and live service notifications there as well as on Spectrum.”

Props

February saw headway into Area 18’s props: the core street furniture is now in and the team has moved onto the dressing pass, adding in new assets to give life to the streets, alleyways, and landing zone.

As the month closed out, the team jumped into release mode to get a head start squashing bugs and generally tightening up the upcoming release.

QA

Things ramped up on the publishing side in February as the team prepared Alpha 3.5 for the Evocati and PTU. Testing continues on the New Flight Model and other systems as they come online, such as the new weapons, ships, and locations. QA leadership continues to train the newer testers and improve the overall testing process.

The AI Feature Team kept the Frankfurt-based QA testers busy with new features, such as the improved avoidance system and new break-away maneuvers. Testing mainly consists of making sure they’re working as intended, as well as noting visible improvements to what was already in place (in the case of the avoidance system). Combat AI received perception updates which were tested by QA to address issues where the FPS AI would not recognize the player being present in their vicinity.

On the backend, changes to the subsumption visualizer are being tested to ensure no new issues have been introduced in preparation for their full integration into the editor. Testing for ArcCorp and Area 18 is currently underway too.

The Universe Team discovered that mining entities were not appearing in the client due to discrepancies in how they were spawned in the server. This was tracked down and fixed, though testing will continue to make sure it’s working as intended.

Ships

The Vehicle Content Team wrapped up the MISC Reliant Mako, Tana, and Sen variants for Alpha 3.5. They’re now in testing with QA who are addressing bugs before the vehicles go live. The designers and tech artists have been busy with the Origin 300i, which will reach QA for testing in the near future.

Back in the UK, the team continued production on the 890 Jump, bringing more rooms into the final art stage from greybox (including the hangar area). The Carrack is heading towards a greybox-complete state and select areas are being polished for review.

Development continues on the Banu Defender which is utilizing a new style of production that caters to its organic art style. ZBrush is being used to sculpt the interior before transferring the high-density model to 3ds Max, where it is then rebuilt (low-poly) for the game engine. A large portion of the exterior greybox is complete and looking fantastic.

Last but by no means least, the interior updates to the Vanguard wrapped up with essentially the entire area from the cockpit seat backwards being completely redone. This is more than was initially anticipated, but the team feels that it’s worth it. Now that the interior rework has been finalized and the framework for the variants agreed upon, the Ship Team can start on the exterior changes to accommodate them and continue with the variant-specific items.

System Design

The System Design Team is working on improving and upgrading the no-fly zones used across ArcCorp. Since the existing system now needs to support an entire planet, it has proven quite a challenge.

For social AI, the team’s working on unifying vendor behaviors and making sure they’re built in a modular fashion. For example, the team can easily graft new actions onto the base behavior of a shop keeper to allow them to pick up objects, give them to the player, and interact with things on the counter without having to build new ones from scratch.

As with social AI, the team focused on restructuring FPS AI behaviors to make them more modular, with the goal to make it easier to implement specific chunks of logic. For mining, they added new mineable rocks on ArcCorp’s moons. Wala in particular will have a new type of rock that fits better with the crystalline formations available on the moon.

Finally for System Design, AI traffic over Area 18 is currently being developed. The team’s starting small, with a few ships landing and taking off around the spaceport, but they’re also investigating ways to expand it while being mindful of performance.

Turbulent

RSI Platform: On February 14th, Turbulent supported the announcement of a new flyable variant of the Super Hornet, the F7C-M Heartseeker. They also made major updates to the CMS backend which required all hands on deck.

Services: This month’s game service work was focused around developing support for transporting video streams over the comms channels. This will allow the streaming of a user’s face/in-game texture to another player outside of the bind culling bubble, enabling in-game video calls over wider distances. This method also enables the transmission of in-game video streams to web clients.

Turbulent spent considerable time standardizing services to enable them to run within a new local development environment. This will allow the entire Star Citizen universe’s services to run locally on dev systems to develop and iterate with the entire stack.

The Turbulent Services Team also began work on an administration interface for game designers and game operators to display real-time information about the state of the universe. This application can display information about groups, lobbies, and voice channels along with details of online players, quantum routes, and probability volumes.

UI

As in January, UI supported the Environment Team with in-fiction advertising and branding for Area 18, including animation and hologram textures. They also made headway on the 3D area map using the concepts shown last month as visual targets. Finally, they began working out how to bring the rental functionality from the Arena Commander frontend to in-game consoles in Area 18.

VFX

The VFX Team updated the existing particle lighting system to a more modern system. The previous version was based on tessellation, which increased the rendering cost and had limitations on shadow resolution. The new one is a global change that will remove the need for tessellation and improve shadow receiving for crisper, smoother shadows. ArcCorp’s Lyria and Wala will be the first moons to use this new particle lighting system when it’s ready for deployment. It will help the particles integrate into the moons more realistically and address issues when the particles have long shadows going through them, such as during sunrise and sunset.

They also continued to iterate on thruster damage effects and began rolling it out to all ships.

Several new weapon effects were worked on, including a new ballistic hand cannon and ballistic assault rifle. They also carried out extensive visual exploration for the new Tachyon energy weapon class.

Finally, significant time was invested in improving the VFX editor’s UI layout and functionality. Although not as glamorous as planet dressing and effects, improving the quality-of-life for artists is important and helps them to work faster too.

Weapons

The Weapon Art Team completed the Gemini S71, Kastak Arms Coda, Banu Singe Tachyon cannons, Gallenson Tactical ballistic cannon reworks, and five variants of the Aegis Vanguard nose guns.

Conclusion

WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…

   $(function() {      Page.init();  window.Page = new RSI.Game.About();      });    

[ashlynncoy-blog]

Misfire: Critical Condition Part VIII

Here is Part VIII.

I have madness this week, so I don’t know when I will get time to post again, but I have through part thirteen drafted and the next several bits are very concretely in my head. It’s just getting a minute to be in front of the computer that’s the stumbling block.

Remember that the #Misfire Verse tag will get you all previous installments. Here, have what I call PEAK angst:

Leia had suspected her decision to break things off with Isolder might not go over well with her superiors in government. She had not, however, been at all prepared for the fill weight of the New Republic’s disapproval.

She’d barely been spoken to since her return to Coruscant. Her position on the New Republic Provisional Council had been dissolved along with the others upon the founding of the permanent government. She’d been granted indefinite leave from her duties in the Ministry of State in order to make the trip to the Hapes Consortium with Isolder, and closing in on three months after her return, she’d yet to be re-called to service.

She’d kept as busy as she could. She’d made appearances on behalf of her mother and of Alderaan, and had done her best as a sounding board for her father, who had recently been seated as Chancellor. But things were beginning to get awkward. Chancellor Bail Organa and Chief of State Mon Mothma worked closely together. They were also old friends and trusted colleagues. They’d both shard work space and associated socially since the days before the Empire. There was only so much time that could pass before it became painfully aware to Leia that her father’s friend, her former boss, was avoiding her.

Luke was away most of the time. As much as she supported his quest to understand, and to possibly rebuild, the Jedi Order, Leia missed having her brother around. Winter was away, too—under such deep cover that the two women couldn’t even send messages through a handler. With Han still in a coma (and hating her) and most of her other friends still in the military and off on campaign, the loneliness and boredom had begun to get to her.

She spent what time she could working on the Force meditations and other exercises she’d been taught—keeping a promise she’d made to Luke years before to turn her attentions to the practice as soon as she could find the time. But ever since that day in the hospital with Han, she’d been afraid to fully reach out with her feelings for fear of encountering something so unsettling again. Her mastery of The Force wasn’t improving much.

She was having a hard time figuring out what to do with herself on Coruscant in the absence of any official duties, so when her father had mentioned his plan to spend the Senate’s impending two weeks recess on Alderaan, and asked if she would be interested in joining him, Leia had practically jumped at the suggestion.

Running home to her mother wasn’t entirely in character for Leia, but the idea of being someplace she felt welcome was enough to make the trip more than appealing. Since her return from Hapes, her mother had been gently pressuring her to begin taking on more of the kinds of responsibilities she’d be faced with someday as Queen, and Leia didn’t mind at all if that meant spending some time on Alderaan—and some on-the-job-training with her mother.

She’d packed her bags with an abundance of haste. Anything she forgot, she would surely be able to replace when she got where she was going. That was the advantage of traveling home over any of her other ventures over the years. She’d had her things sent ahead to the spaceport hours ahead of her father’s scheduled arrival at the embassy to retrieve her, and she was sitting on go when Bail finally arrived.

As she rode beside her father in the speeder, Leia couldn’t help but notice they didn’t seem to be heading for their usual port of embarkation.

“Where is the ship?” she asked as Bail piloted their ample two-seater through a particularly bad snarl of traffic.

“It’s right where it usually is,” he answered. “I have a stop to make first.”

Maybe it was The Force or maybe it was the tone in her father’s voice, but Leia knew precisely where they were headed. She’d thought she recognized this part of town, but so much of Coruscant resembled so much of the rest of it that she’d talked herself into thinking it was her own preoccupations making this neighborhood seem familiar. But no—she crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head as her father brought the speeder around the final corner to allow Army Hospital to come into view in the distance.

“Dad,” she said. “no.”

“I have to, Leia.”

“You have to?” she quizzed.

“We’re still listed as General Solo’s next of kin.”

“Oh.” Leia clapped her hand over her mouth. She’d forgotten that. The Alliance was still on Yavin 4 when Bail and Breha Organa had insisted on being listed as both Luke’s and Han’s family on official documents—that way they would be notified in the event of any emergency. Leia hadn’t thought about that in years. She certainly hadn’t considered what that might mean in terms of Han’s current condition.

“I need to sign some forms,” Bail said. He pulled the speeder into the lane that would take him to the hospital’s public landing bay.

“What kind of forms?” Leia asked. She knew Han didn’t want her around, but that didn’t make her any less curious. If she could get updates on his condition from her father, then she was damned sure going to.

“They want to put him back in the bacta tank,” Bail answered.

“That’s good,” Leia said, remembering what Wedge had told her about how they’d wanted to wait on bacta until Han was more stable.

“I’m afraid it’s not,” her father countered.

“What?”

“It’s quite the opposite,” he told her. “He’s just not healing. There’s nothing more they can do.”

“But Wedge said they can’t resuscitate him,” Leia argued. Surely Bail had heard this. If he’d signed forms for Han’s care before now, he must have been told about that.

“I know,” Bail replied somberly. “But what good is it if they keep resuscitating him only to have him get sicker and sicker? Eventually they won’t be able to get him back at all. It’s reached a point where it’s too risky to keep him out of bacta. Maybe,” he said, “if we’re lucky, the bacta will do enough. Because that’s the only chance he has left right now.”

Leia could feel her lower lip beginning to tremble as she fisted her hands in her skirt.

Bail pulled the speeder onto the hospital platform and lowered its parking struts.

“You can wait here if you need to,” Bail said as he opened his door. “I understand this is hard for you.”

Leia sniffled as she considered his offer.

“No,” she said. She reached over and opened her own door, careful not to let her knees buckle from the fear she felt as she stepped out onto the tarmac. “I’ll wait in the hall.”

Leia walked beside her father across the landing platform and to the lift that would take them to the right floor. She couldn’t help but notice the confidence with which her father made the trip, but she dared not ask how many times he’d come to visit. It was clear that he’d been here plenty; as they traversed the labyrinthine corridors between the lift and the Critical Care wing, he didn’t have to look at a single sign.

Leia could tell something was horribly wrong as soon as they set foot onto the familiar hallway. There was a klaxon sounding. Beings and droids were scurrying into and out of the open door to one of the treatment suites. When she realized what was going on and whose room they were concerned with, Leia broke into a flat run toward it.

She was reaching out with her feelings. She needed to get some hold of Han, some grip on whatever part of him was still around. It was a risk, she knew. She was driven by fear and terror and Luke would probably say she was falling to the Dark Side, but that was a matter she’d deal with another day. Right now there was only one thing she gave a damn about.

She rounded the corner into Han’s room at full speed. There were doctors, nurses, droids, and machines on all sides of the bed. Leia could barely get a glimpse of Han where he lay. But she knew he was there. She knew it in The Force and she knew it by the readouts on the screens all over the room. He was crashing, but he wasn’t down yet.

“We’re losing him!” one of the doctors shouted, reaching for some implement being held at stand-by by a droid just behind her.

“Come to, General!” Leia yelled, “You are not dismissed!”.

Her voice was strident and Forceful, the same as if she was giving him an order to evacuate a failing ship—only this order was precisely the opposite. She could feel him then—something—some part of him responding to her call. There was only one thing she could think to say. “Yeah,” she said, “it’s me. I’m back.” She wiped her moist eyes with her sleeve and continued. “You want me to go?” she asked, “well then wake the hell up and throw me out!”

The medical team continued their work. Leia watched as numbers and lines danced and variated on screens all around as stimulators and medications were administered left and right.

She took a step closer.

“Otherwise,” she said, with a little more control of herself than before, “I get the satisfaction of knowing the last thing you knew on this mortal plane was the sound of my voice!”

“I have a pulse,” a nurse called out then.

“Heart rate is normalizing,” the emdee droid announced. “Spontaneous respirations.”

The team at Han’s bedside seemed to let out a collective sigh.

Leia was gasping. She could feel something—some tension, some spark of Han struggling to come to the surface. Maybe he was trying to wake up and throw her out. She didn’t know. All she did know was that he was alive, and that had to be enough for today.

She clapped both hands over her mouth to stifle the sobs as she backed out of the room.

Just on the other side of the door, Bail Organa caught his daughter by the shoulders and spun her around, wrapping his arms around her as she wept.

“Shhhh, Leilila,” he whispered, his own tears escaping as he spoke. He rocked her gently in his embrace, patting her hair the way he always had when she’d needed soothing as a little child.

“I know I’ve already lost him,” she said, trying her best to get just a little hold of herself, “but I just can’t lose him again, dad. I can’t.”

“I know, baby girl,” he replied. “And we’re doing everything we can.”

[lovesantoshblr]

Google Tag Manager - How to track events on your site

https://nidmdigitalmarketing.com/digital-marketing-institute-in-banglore/

In many cases, however, tracking user behaviors on your pages is important. For example, click the "add to Cart" button, submit a form, or view a video.

These behaviors are known as "events," so today, we will show you how to send them to Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager.

The Battle Plan

Let's make a battle plan as usual so that we all know what we are doing.

We will begin by stating that we will. Compile a list We want to track.

We will, second. Set up event triggers. You can track every event on your website with a tool called CSS Element Selectors.

We will also be distributing the information. Set up tags send data to Google Analytics for each event.

We will, finally. Use the "preview" feature in Google Tag Manager to ensure that all events are correctly tracked.

We recommend Google Tag Manager to track events for the following reasons:

This is the approach that does not require you to add any code to your website. Implementation will be much easier if there isn't a technical person in your team.

Google is always changing its tracking system. They are soon to release gtag.js, their new tracking code library. Google Tag Manager is a great way to avoid having to go back into your codebase and change the tracking mechanism each time there is an update.

Google Tag Manager This interface is easier to use to see which events are being followed; if you have many events to track on your website, this interface will help you keep organized.

Step 1: Create a list

First, identify the events you want to track.

I was a big fan of the "track all" approach. This advocates the tracking of every event that occurs on your website.

This approach has the advantage of allowing you to see the entire user experience on your site. Being a data scientist, I love the idea of all the data.

This approach has a drawback: It is easy to become overwhelmed by the volume of data and overestimate the business value of spending time analyzing every element of your page.

This approach is not recommended for small to medium-sized businesses. Larger companies should still consider investing in sophisticated tools for behavior tracking, such as Hot jar (for event mapping) or Heap Analytics (for tracking event funnels) rather than using Google Analytics.

Recently, I have become a big fan of the "macro-and-micro conversion" approach. This advocates only tracking macro and microscopic conversion events on your site.

This approach recognizes the danger of analyzing every website event and teaches analysts to only record those events that are important to your business.

These events can be macro conversion events. These are the steps your customers must go through in order to make a purchase or to submit a lead form. These events could also be called micro-conversion

events, which indicate greater audience engagement. These could include clicking buttons to sign up for your newsletter or browsing product information on the website.

Based on the above description, compile a list of micro-and macro-conversion events that you can use for your website. Next, we'll be ready for the next step: actually setting up event tracking.

Step 2: Setting up event triggers

Let's begin by briefly recapping what we talked about last week regarding triggers.

Google Tag Manager automatically tracks page visits and events on your website by default. It doesn't keep any data unless you ask it to. You can use triggers to tell GTM to track specific events or page views you wish to send to Google Analytics and other services.

We need to inform Google Tag Manager that the events we have compiled in the previous steps will be sent to Google Analytics. We will use a CSS element selector to do this.

A brief primer on how to choose events

It is important to conceptually understand how buttons on your website are coded and how we will choose these elements to identify the events you wish to track.

All elements on your website are coded using HTML tags following the structure shown below.

An HTML tag contains several key components.

The tag Name Indicate the function of the tag in the context of your website. In this example, "h1" refers to "the first header."

Attribute name you can also specify additional information about the header, such as its description. Class this is used to group tags with similar attributes. This is used as the unique identifier for tags Styles.

The affected Content This is the text that will appear on the website in a button or a paragraph.

A CSS element selector, which is a search language that allows you to identify specific HTML tags on your site using the components of the tag, can be used to help you understand these elements.

The following query, "h1.primary", can be used to select the HTML tag shown in the graphic.

The link below will provide more information about the syntax and use of CSS selectors.

Enable the Element Selector in Google Tag Manager

We have now conceptually understood the process of selecting events. Let's get down to business.

Google Tag Manager lets you identify events on your website using the various attributes of those events (they call them "variables"). Google Tag Manager allows you to view a complete list of its built-in variables by clicking the "variable->config" button.

Google Tag Manager provides a comprehensive list of variables that can be used to identify events.

This tutorial will be about clicking, which is one of the most fundamental events.

We will use the "Click Element" variable to accomplish this. It can be enabled on the screen below by clicking the box next to "Click Element." You can also enable other boxes within the Clicks category for more options during event selection.

Identify the CSS selector for your events.

We now need to identify the unique CSS selector for each event.

To do that, we will enlist the help of Google Chrome Web Development Tool, a series of tools that you automatically have access to if you have Google Chrome.

As an example, we will use the Google Merchandise Store.

When a user clicks the add-to-cart button for a product on Google Merchandise Store, the add-to-cart action takes place on the page and not on a separate page. This click must be recorded as a micro-conversion.

When on this specific screen (you can follow along by going to this link), right-click and select "inspect" on the dropdown menu. The right-hand side panel of the console will appear in the screenshot below.

The screenshot explains that you need to first click on the element selection icon in the upper left corner of your console. Next, hover over the element you are interested in using your cursor. Click on it to reveal your CSS identifier.

Finally, use the console query document. query Selector All to make sure there is only one result returning, so the CSS selector is unique (this will usually be the case). You now have your CSS selector.

P.S. P.S. If that doesn't work, identify the overlapping element in your CSS selector and exclude it from Google Tag Manager Triggering (we'll show you how).

Setup the Trigger

We are now ready to trigger the alarm.

Select "New" from the "Triggers" section in Google Tag Manager.

Click on the Trigger Configuration Box and choose Click >> All Elements.

Select "Some Clicks" in the setup screen. This means that you want to only track clicks occurring on your website.

Next, click Click Element, Matches HTML Selector, and enter the unique CSS selector that you have identified in the previous step.

You should make sure that your CSS selector is unique even if you extend the parameters.

It should look something like the picture below once everything is set up.

Finally, save all configurations. We are now ready to assign the tag!

Step 3: Set up the tag

Good news! The most difficult part of this process has been completed. It's now all non-technical smooth sailing!

This step will allow us to set up a tag that sends the event trigger through Google Analytics.

As I explained in our last week's post, navigate to the "Tag" section on Google Tag Manager by using the right navigation bar.

Click on the red "New" button at the top of your screen.

Configure the Tag

You can configure the tag using the exact same Google Analytics settings that you used last week, but this time select "Events."

You will have more options to tell Google Analytics about the event by selecting it. This is how I recommend organizing events. However, you can create your own structure.

Category: This is the general category of the event. It can be a check-out event, engagement event, or something else.

Take action. This is the action that took place during this event. For example, click_ add_ to_ cart or click _video.

Label: Here, you can add additional information about your events, such as the product clicked or the video being watched.

I value the following: If you're using sophisticated micro-conversion values assignment in your analytics pipeline, you can assign a value for this event. If you don't have a sophisticated micro-conversion value assignment, you can assign a value to this event. Otherwise, I recommend that you leave it blank.

Once you have completed all information, click Save. Let's now set up the Trigger.

The Trigger can be connected to the Connect Tag.

This step is easy. This step is easy. Save, and your tags will be officially configured.

Step 4: Debugging using the Preview Feature in Google Tag Manager

Technically, you need to make sure that all your events are correctly configured on Google Analytics. This is a common problem with every technology.

This is why you have to be prepared. Tools Google Tag Manager's preview function is available to assist you in determining if the event tracking you have just set up is functioning.

Once you have set up all the events that you want to track, click the "Preview" button in the upper right corner to go into preview mode. Open the Google Tag Manager tab and then open a new tab to your website. The bottom of your screen will have a debugger section that looks similar to the one below.

This section lists all actions you have taken to your website. The right side shows you which tag fired in each action.

Go back to the event list and click on each one to verify that the tag is working correctly. Double-check everything to ensure it's working correctly.

Once everything is properly configured, return to Google Tag Manager and submit all changes for event tracking. Congratulations, you are done!

https://nidmdigitalmarketing.com/digital-marketing-institute-in-banglore/

[userbaekhyun]

i was in the area at the time, adding more details below. as molly said DO NOT go onto social media and search for itaewon in the tags, there are graphic videos and pictures without any sort of censoring that can literally cause symptoms of ptsd for those who watch. trigger warning for the content below but i will avoid any graphic description:

essentially we aren’t sure about a specific cause at this time in terms of an event unfolding but here are some of the facts:

this was the first year without an outdoor mask mandate and limits on gathering sizes since covid began meaning that many people took it as an opportunity to go out and have fun

reports say anywhere from 100k-130k people were in itaewon that night for halloween celebrations

the alleyway where this occurred begins at 5-7 meters across at the top (depending on the source) but eventually becomes a bottleneck at 3.6 meters at the bottom due to illegal construction of a wall by the next door hamilton hotel which spills into the alleyway. it is also on a slope

this alley is right between itaewon station exit one and itaewon “food street” where there are many popular bars and clubs, making it so people who are both trying to leave and enter itaewon often use this alleyway

only about 137 police officers were sent to itaewon that night despite the fact that officials very much knew that the crowds would be large, due to the fact that it was halloween, itaewon is generally crowded and friday night it was very busy with the expectation that saturday would be even worse

the officers that were there were for crime prevention reasons other than crowd control, even though hundreds of officers had been sent to a peaceful protest earlier that day and i believe about 700 were working as the president’s security nearby as he moved his operations to yongsan from the blue house, meaning they had to reallocate a lot of forces to him

they supposedly did not implement any sort of crowd control because that usually only happens when an event has a single organizer and this wasn’t one particular event, just a popular location

police officers received dozens of calls in the hours leading up to the crush, including at least 11 that warned of exactly that occurring but only dispatched 4 times in response

i’m not going into detail about how crowd crushes work on someone else’s post because it’s horrible but essentially the crush occurred because the alleyway got too busy and was made worse due to the slope and the fact that it gets narrower and narrower, while already being a confined space. molly already covered all that above 

i give all this information to say that there is no single person or group directly responsible for this event, definitely not the victims. when you’re in that situation there is essentially nothing you can do and south korea is known for having large crowds that are very controlled. as far as i know no other crush has ever happened in this country’s history and every event i’ve ever been to with a high amount of people has never made me feel unsafe. on top of that in a previous halloween before covid there was 200k people in itaewon with no casualties occurring due to proper safety planning. there was no reason why people would believe they were unsafe

if there is anyone to blame it would be the government officials who did not implement a safety plan, crowd control or designate the appropriate forces to that area despite the knowledge that it would be crowded, as well as the police who did not respond appropriately to emergency calls (i am not talking about officers on the scene who were almost single handedly attempting to save the lives of hundreds). in previous years that alley has been controlled. they know that it’s unsafe and they did nothing. it was utterly preventable but they ignored all the signs and i even heard that the police chief said he found out about the incident near 1 am on sunday. it happened at 10:15 saturday. i got my first emergency alert nearly 2 hours after the event occurred, urging people to leave the area. what kind of response is that?

how does the crowd crush even begin in itaewon? I try to read some articles but I couldn't understand much. my poor english comprehension 👁️👄👁️ could u pls explain?

sure i hope i can explain it a bit better for you. first, my thoughts go out to the victims, their families, and anyone else affected by this tragedy. second, please, even if you're curious, DONT go on twt or anywhere else where disturbing graphic videos are getting posted, those are things you cant unsee.

Keep reading

[germainetrittle86]

Letter of a Social Worker

LETTER OF A SOCIAL WORKER

Dear Former Colleague,

You asked how we have been faring here in our part of the world. Not too well, if I can be honest with you.

With the continuing health and economic crisis brought about by the COVID19 pandemic, there has been regular and consistent support for our medical frontliners who are at the forefront of this battle. However, there are many other players who are not as recognized or appreciated for their valuable contributions such as our beloved social workers.

Early on, many of our brethren knew they would be one of those who will be called upon to continue rendering service in spite of the dangers of infection. Not only as part of the public service, but as genuine development workers tasked with uplifting the quality of life of others, the general welfare of our countrymen had to take precedence. Both regular and MOA social workers of the DSWD became part of the valuable Social Amelioration Program (SAP) distributions, while some welcomed returning OFWs and processed numerous Locally-Stranded Individuals (LSIs), and others continued to serve at our Crisis Intervention Units (CIUs) providing financial assistance to vulnerable clients

So while medical frontliners were being lauded for their sacrifice, and the police and the military manning our checkpoints garnered much sympathy of risking their lives, we did not hear much about our poor social workers going down into the communities with no or limited protective gear (initially some were compelled to buy their own masks and gloves), risking their health and of their families who they went home to after each dangerous exposure. COVID Testing then was not the norm, and some social workers and Special Disbursement Officers (SDOs) were forced to shell out from their own pockets thousands of hard-earned money to spend for their own swabtests.

Such insensitivity amounted to abuse when poor MOA/COS workers could not avail of the Alternative Work Arrangement (AWA) prescribed by the Civil Service Commission for regular employees in government. As such, it was the MOA/COS social workers who were time and again sent to the battlefront, without proper life insurance or healthcare, nor the benefit of tenure, with the threat of insubordination and not being renewed hanging over their heads.

Meanwhile, DSWD Management just like the leadership of this poor nation, were late with their crucial decision-making. Knowing fully well of the health risks our DSWD social workers were being exposed to, they failed to institute the much-needed interventions early on. While testing was allegedly not allowed due to Department budgetary concerns, a well-coordinated referral system to institutions like Philippine Red Cross, Quezon City Health Department, the UP Health Service or even the Marikina LGU testing facility could have been undertaken. It took the DSWD employees union SWEAP to intervene and initiate initial rapid-testing of Central Office employees since there was no efficient contact tracing and health status reporting being conducted then at the workplace as fellow personnel began infecting each other. Without the support and sense of urgency of the DSWD officials, any proposed guidelines and concrete interventions took months before being implemented. By then, there were already five (5) COVID-related deaths amongst our colleagues – an asthmatic MOA who continued to do field work because AWA was not allowed, an exhausted SAP frontliner who succumbed to cardiac arrest, a driver who had comorbidities but was unknowingly exposed to an infected co-worker. At least two of these DSWD employees died of COVID possibly due to exposure in the field or in the office itself, while 2 others were due to the exhaustion and stress of SAP distribution.

I continue to lament the fate of my poor colleagues in the DSWD. Not only are the MOA/COS being subjected to these unnecessary COVID risks, they suffer in silence for non-renewal of contracts, late signing of their contracts resulting in unpaid rendered service, delayed salaries, and no hazard pay, not even the legally-mandated Magna Carta of Public Social Workers. And now with the Mandanas ruling and the impending threat of devolution, many of our social workers will be displaced when the budget of some social services and programs are transferred to the LGUs. At a time of great health and economic upheaval because of COVID, the DSWD Management will be contributing more numbers to the poor by adding its own employees to the sector. The Philippine government is technically throwing the very same people it tasked to raise marginalized sectors from the quagmire of poverty to the same quicksand of economic vulnerability.

Of late, a young social worker from NCR was murdered, and speculations point to his being a SDO tasked with handling money. The employees union SWEAP has unfortunately been linked to red-tagged organizations and SWEAP officers are now being harassed and charged administratively. Things are going from bad to worse. Perish the thought it gets even worst.

We ask that media turn its attention to the plight of our dear social workers and highlight their struggles too. We ask that professional associations of social workers, PASWI, ADSWI, and NASWEI, show their support and rally the troops for their common goals. Most of all, we ask the DSWD Management and the Philippine government to be accountable and to do their part, just as our social workers have been faithfully doing since Day 1 of this COVID pandemic.

Be well, stay safe where you are, dear Colleague. Please pray and remain hopeful for the Philippines.

 Your Development Worker Friend

[orbemnews]

Everything you need to know about the clock change this weekend The changing of the clocks happens twice each year – but somehow it manages to catch people out each time. It’s suddenly that time of year again when we “spring forward” – which means we move the clock forward one hour. Thankfully, these days most smartphones do it for us – but you’ll still need to go around adjusting any analogue timepieces you still have. We’re currently using Greenwich Meantime (GMT), which means when the clocks change we’ll be moving to British Summer Time (BST). Unfortunately, that means we’ll lose an hour of sleep – so you’ll want to make note of when it happens. What time does the clock go forward? The clocks go forward tonight to mark the start of British Summer Time (Image: Getty Images/EyeEm) Read More Related Articles Read More Related Articles The clock will go forward one hour in the early hours of Sunday, March 28 2021. More specifically – the clock will jump forward at 1am – which means it will suddenly become 2am. The change always happens on the last Sunday of March in the middle of the night to make sure there is as little disruption as possible. Clocks go back again at 2am on the final Sunday of October, which is October 31 this year. Why do the clocks change each year? The clocks go forward at 1am (Image: Getty Images) Read More Related Articles The clocks go forward so that there is more daylight in the evenings, and less in the mornings. The idea of daylight savings time was first proposed by American scientist Benjamin Franklin in 1784. However, it wasn’t until 1907 when a serious proposal was made by William Willett in Britain. He was angry at the waste of daylight during the summer morning, and he self-published a pamphlet called “The Waste of Daylight”. Sadly, the UK government took some convincing to make the clock change official. It wasn’t until a year after the builder died that the clock change was implemented. BST was introduced via the Summer Time Act 1916. Tips for coping with the clock change The clocks always go forwards on the last weekend in March, and back in October (Image: Getty Images) Read More Related Articles Shaeeb Ali, advanced clinical practitioner and independent pharmacist prescriber at MedsOnline247, shared his methods on how to get a good night’s sleep as BST begins. He said: ”Although we only lose an hour’s worth of sleep when the clocks spring forward, moving time in either direction resets our circadian rhythm. This means that for a few days, our internal body clocks become out of sync with our normal day and time cycle. “Some people will feel little effect from the clocks changing. However, for others, such as those already struggling with insomnia, the change is likely to be quite noticeable. There is a lot of uncertainty in the UK at the moment due to the pandemic and the third lockdown, which is likely to have a further influence on sleeping patterns.” The Mirror’s newsletter brings you the latest news, exciting showbiz and TV stories, sport updates and essential political information. The newsletter is emailed out first thing every morning, at 12noon and every evening. Never miss a moment by signing up to our newsletter here. Here are his tips: 1. Prepare for the clock change by bringing your bedtime forward slightly by 10 minutes each day. 2. Sleeping aids should only be taken as a temporary measure for a short time, but can be effective. Shaeeb said: “Melatonin is a natural hormone produced by the body and can be found in medication such as Circadin, which helps the body adjust its internal clock. It is often used by those who suffer from jet lag to adjust their sleeping patterns as a result of work schedule changes, and to help blind people establish a day and night cycle.” 3. If you prefer a more natural way, try taking heath supplements such as 5-HTP (5-Hydroxy-Tryptophan), an amino acid that your body naturally produces. 4. Another great and natural form of relief is herbal remedies such as as milk thistle. 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[fossadeileonixv]

Addio Suso!

The day many of us have been dreaming of.

For those of you living without 24 hours news, pending a physical, Jesús Joaquín Fernández Sáenz de la Torre, known endearingly as Suso by the footballing world, is on his way to the Spanish outfit Sevilla on an 18 month loan with a mandatory purchase clause if the Andulusian side qualify for the Champions League. Having been displaced in Pioli’s 4-4-2 by the reborn Samu Castillejo, Maldini & Friends have finally pulled the trigger on selling one of the club’s more important players over the past five seasons.

This isn’t going to be a touchdown dance piece. There are a lot of players who have come and gone through the doors of Milanello that weren’t deserving of the jersey, even banter era jerseys, over the past decade. For all his limitations, and this is certainly a point of contention here and on Twitter, Suso was not one of them.

Brought in during that magical 2015 Winter Mercato along with Gabriel Paletta, Luca Antonelli, Mattia Destro, and ‘Big Sal�� Bocchetti (criminally underrated player I may add) to compliment the firestorm that was a Jeremy Menez-led front line, the former Liverpool academy product struggled to catch footing in the complicated tactics of Pippoball. With Sinisa Mihajlovic taking the reigns in the summer of 2015 and implementing a 4-4-2, Suso once again found it difficult to break into a surprisingly in-form side and was loaned out to Genoa in January, where he would begin to show glimpses of the type of attacking player he could become bagging 6 goals and an assist during his half season as a Griffone.

Partly due to dementia fully taking over former owner Silvio Berlusconi’s decision-making, Miha was unceremoniously shown the exit with games left to go in the 2016 campaign and Vincenzo Montella was tipped to lead the Red & Black back to glory under the provisional auspices of unknown Chinese overlords. It was under Montella that Suso hit his stride hitting the back of the net 7 times and contributing 8 assists across all competitions while picking up his first piece of hardware in the Supercoppa Italiana against Juventus. The tricky footwork, pinpoint crosses, and dangerous cut-ins became a calling card an he was, as I think anyone can agree, the straw that stirred the drink in the attack. And he would continue being the lone creative presence even after the Chinaboyz officially took over and spent a quarter of a billion euro to bring the club back to the Champions League.

However, it was during the 2017-18 season that the cracks began to show in a team that relied on Suso to create chances as well as Suso the player. Though a multitude of factors contributed to Milan’s disastrous campaign, almost all of which larger than Suso, it became painstakingly clear as each big money transfer began flopping, that while Suso was indeed the only player capable of creating quality chances for both himself and others, if this wasn’t coming off, neither club nor player had a plan B. From a tactical perspective, over-relying on Suso was dangerous but necessary with no other attacking player able to fill that creative void. However, having a wide player as your lone source of creativity became increasingly easy for teams to snuff out. Bringing the extra midfielder or winger back to close down space stymied Suso with his supporting cast unable to compensate. From a player perspective, while it may have been easy to beat one or two defenders to get off the shot or cross, our #8 found it increasingly difficult to replicate chances with the terrain in front of him clogged. To boot, he didn’t have the qualities that you really want from a winger. He was small, slow, lacked physicality and work-rate, and rarely made off the ball runs. He would still display moments of sheer brilliance and on a number of occasions, was the sole reason we were able to grab points in certain matches, but the limitations of where a Suso-led attack could lead you were becoming evident.

Last season gave us both sides of Suso. Starting out of the gates hot, he cooled dramatically in the second half of the season with his shortcomings becoming hindrances to both attack and defense. His approach didn’t change and teams were catching on, easily neutralizing his side, cutting a frustrating figure for fans and player alike. By the end of the season it was apparent to many that the winger simply was not the kind of fit that the squad needed and calls for him to be shipped out became more vociferous. His tenure was extended thanks to insights of Marco Giampaolo who was convinced he could convert him to a trequartista, but the Mister promptly abandoned the 4-3-1-2 formation after exactly one game; a telling sign of Suso’s capabilities.

Fast forward to today, and there aren’t many Milanisti wiping the tears away due to his departure. While I appreciate the role he played on this team in some really dire seasons, I waned on him over the past year as his attitude was a little to proud for someone of his skillset. I’ll accept lots of players, even frustarting ones, if they’re out there leaving it all on the field. Suso isn’t that type of guy. He famously claimed he “didn’t have to prove anything to anyone” after criticism from the Curva after nearly a year of poor form. And while I have never questioned his loyalty to the club, but the fact that he requested a transfer after two great performances from someone playing his position, also speaks more of his character to me than his actual play. Russu said it best when he tagged him a big fish in a small pond. He was a good to great player on poor teams that really had no other option, but has never proved to be someone you can rely on day in and day out. But at the same time, he is who he is. I think as expectations with this club grew, so did our expectations of Suso, but these were simply developments he was unable to make.

So while I appreciate the five years at San Siro, this is absolutely the right time to part ways. The team is (fingers goddamn crossed) finally turning a corner and (fingers goddamn crossed) finally shedding a number of the players that were banter holdovers. Simply put, there’s no space for Suso here, right now.

With that, Addio, Suso! I honestly hope you can make it work at Sevilla, but please make that a one-way ticket.

[tak4hir0]

Affiliate Disclosure: By buying the products we recommend, you help keep the lights on at MakeUseOf. Read more. If you plan on getting a MacBook, research on the features and faults of Apple’s devices can go a long way in shaping your buying decision. You don’t want to purchase a new device only to find that it has a notorious problem. But if you’ve already purchased a MacBook and notice an issue, there might be a way around it. Here are some of Apple’s biggest MacBook hardware blunders, and how to fix them if you’re affected. 1. Early Generations of the Butterfly KeyboardWhen Apple launched the revamped 12-inch MacBook in 2015, it came with a noticeably different keyboard. According to the company, the redesign of the keyboard was meant to accommodate the sleek frame of the machine. The butterfly mechanism underneath the keys certainly resulted in thinner keys than the traditional scissor mechanism. Over time, Apple implemented this design on the new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models as well. At the time of writing, Apple’s machine includes the third-generation butterfly keyboard. However, for most Mac users, the butterfly keyboard has been more of a hindrance than a help. In particular, the space bar was highly unreliable. After a period of use, it felt like it was bottoming out on the right side, with only the left side responding to a press. Apple’s keyboard also featured several instances of sticky keys. This was a result of the shallow depth of the keys, making it easy for them to get stuck within the grooves of the board. Even worse, the keyboard was also sensitive to dust and debris. If dust particles get under the key, you can likely expect it not to function correctly again. These problems are present from the first generation to third-generation butterfly keyboards. If you’re dealing with a case of dust or food debris under your keyboard, make use of a toothpick to remove it. We’ve also looked at what you can do to fix a stuck MacBook keyboard Why MacBook Keyboards Break So Easily (And How to Fix Jammed Keys) Why MacBook Keyboards Break So Easily (And How to Fix Jammed Keys) Macbook keyboard not working? Here's how to remove dust from your keyboard and other settings to check that can fix your issue. Read More . People who’ve had constant cases of stuck keys or a malfunctioning space bar may qualify for Apple’s Keyboard Service Program. 2. MacBook Pro SSD FailureIf you bought a 13-inch MacBook Pro between 2017 and 2018, there’s a chance you might lose your data. You may also get locked out from accessing the drive. As it turns out, Apple had issues with its batch of SSDs for this generation of laptops. According to Apple, some of its 128GB and 256GB 13-inch Macbook Pro units had a system fault which could trigger loss of data on the SSD. Knowing the warning signs that your SSD is about to fail 5 Warning Signs Your SSD Is About to Break Down and Fail 5 Warning Signs Your SSD Is About to Break Down and Fail Worried your SSD will malfunction and break down and take all of your data with it? Look for these warning signs. Read More can help you safeguard against issues like this. To check if your laptop suffers from this fault, you need to identify the MacBook Pro model you have. Only the non-Touch Bar 13-inch laptops are affected by this. Head to Apple’s Solid State Drive Service Program page and enter your device’s serial number to see if you’re eligible. If you are, then Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider will service your affected drive for free. We recommend backing up your Mac data How to Use Time Machine to Back Up Your Mac How to Use Time Machine to Back Up Your Mac Time Machine is your Mac's built-in utility for backing up your computer. We'll show you how to set up Time Machine, make backups, and more. Read More immediately and going in for service as soon as possible, as you may irrecoverably lose data otherwise. 3. Delamination of Retina Display CoatingWhen talking about Mac missteps, it is impossible not to include the Retina display delamination. This was a problem in MacBook and MacBook Pro models manufactured from 2012 to 2017. Apple’s Retina display is a marketing name for its high pixel density screens, which result in a clearer picture. Unfortunately, many of the MacBook models to first offer this display had faults with delamination, which occurs when a material breaks into layers. At first, the fracture appears on the Retina display’s anti-reflective coating as smudges, until it spreads and forms a layer on the screen. When this happens, it’s much harder to use the display on your Mac. According to Apple, impact or stress to the surface of the display can lead to this. However, people also identified that the coating applied to the Retina display was too weak. This, in turn, affects the ability of the surface to withstand stress. There is no sure fix for the delamination of your Mac’s Retina display. At one point, Apple offered affected users replacement screens. However, this service has expired. Unless you feel confident enough to replace the display yourself, you’re best off contacting Apple Support or an authorized service provider to look into replacement options. 4. The Touch BarAlthough some may swear by the usefulness of the Touch Bar in the MacBook Pro, this innovative feature has plenty of faults that make it a worthy addition to the list. The Touch Bar was launched with the 2016 MacBook Pro. This strip of OLED screen, in place of the old function keys, provided dynamic controls for Mac programs. While it’s a fun feature and cool selling point in the store, it wasn’t all beneficial. As the Touch Bar was a replacement for the function keys, the general anticipation was that it would improve efficiency. However, most found the Touch Bar more disappointing than anything. Unlike the function keys, which were fast and responsive to instructions, the Touch Bar makes performing common actions slower. For example, adjusting brightness with a function key takes a split-second with muscle memory. In the case of the Touch Bar, you have to focus on the bar, aim your finger, and move a slider to perform the same action. This is especially the case with the common Escape key, which can disappear with certain Touch Bar controls. Another fault is how easy it is to accidentally trigger actions by a mere brush of your fingers over the bar. Unfortunately, unlike the other problems listed above, there is no official Apple recall or servicing for these issues. We recommend either making the Touch Bar more useful How to Make the MacBook Pro Touch Bar More Useful: 4 Tips How to Make the MacBook Pro Touch Bar More Useful: 4 Tips Don't like the MacBook Pro's Touch Bar? You might find it more useful with these tips and apps to supercharge the Touch Bar. Read More for you, or you can disable the Touch bar completely The MacBook Pro Touch Bar Sucks, So I Disabled It The MacBook Pro Touch Bar Sucks, So I Disabled It In June 2017 I finally took the plunge and purchased a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. Months later, I did the unthinkable and disabled Touch Bar functionality. Read More if you prefer. Is Buying a Mac Still Worth It?We’ve seen above that even Apple isn’t immune to hardware issues and blunders. Whether you buy an old or new Mac, there’s chance you could run into some of the problems above. However, most other aspects of Apple’s computers are top-notch. These are relatively minor blemishes on otherwise solid computers, so you can still buy with confidence in most cases. If you have other issues with your Mac, have a look at the best free tools to fix common macOS issues The 8 Best Free Mac Tools to Detect and Fix Common macOS Problems The 8 Best Free Mac Tools to Detect and Fix Common macOS Problems Every Mac user should keep these 8 tools around to fix any problems that may arise, like malware, hardware issues, and more. Read More .

[cgknowhow]

GSoC Coding Phase - Part 1

Hello everyone!

A lot has happened since the GSoC results were declared! I’ve got quite a few things implemented in my project, I’ll be breaking the discussion of the first part of the coding phase into two or three parts. So lets get into it without further ado.

According to my proposal here, I had one week of community bonding, during which I had to make sure that I had everything I needed to begin with the project, and discuss with the mentors what i should be doing ahead of time. I received a mail from my mentors, Brad and Marc welcoming me to the program. After some discussion it was decided that I should modify my milestones a little bit. Swift for TensorFlow is being used in the Fast.ai course. And there’s a lot of interest in displaying plots in Jupyter notebooks, which is being driven by this. This was to be moved to the first milestone. I have never worked with Jupyter notebooks before let alone editing code that communicated with a Jupyter Kernel. Marc guided me through this. It was decided that for an initial implementation I could use the Swift-Python interoperability to display base64 images in a relatively straightforward manner. Once I implemented some of the planned plots I could work on a pure Swift implementation.

One of the most important parts of building a framework is that it functions as expected. There will definitely be many revisions and changes to the code later on. This warranted a need for the presence of some tests included in the project repository. This would help in making sure that new changes did not break the previously working plots. (I am really glad that we decided to include this in the first milestone itself. It helped me find a really important bug! We’ll come to it in later on)

I have been a little vague in my proposal about implementation of Sub Plots. For those who don’t know what Sub Plots are, they are multiple graphs included in a single display/image. They can be of any type(Line Graph, Bar Graph, etc.). It was necessary to include Sub Plots in the first milestone itself because each Plot would have to be coded in a way that it could be part of a Sub Plot. Implementing all the plots independently and later adding Sub Plot support would be a lot of extra work!

So this is what was decided. In the first milestone I would do the following:

Make a simple Line Chart implementation with Sub Plot support.

Setup tests that saves images.

Get a base64 encoded PNG and use it in Jupyter notebook. Later work on python free implementation.

Complete line chart implementation in the leftover time.

The rest of the stuff for the first milestone according to my proposal were to be moved to the second milestone.

It didn’t take long for me to complete the simple line chart. I used most of the code from the prototype I had made with a few changes.

Let’s look briefly at the LineGraph implementation. All the further discussion will be applicable to Linux (I am using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS) unless otherwise specified.

The first step was to set up the Swift Package. For absolute beginners, this is how you initialise a Swift Package using the Swift Package manager:

Execute this command in the terminal.

swift package init --type library

This will initialise a package that is primarily meant to be a library. If you want a package with an executable as the build product, you can change the type flag to executable.

Before implementing the plots I had to set up the renderers because they were the entities that would handle all the image generation. The plan was to have almost no plotting logic in the Renderers. They would just allow you to draw primitives such as Lines, Rectangles, Text, etc.

One of the Renderers part of the project is the Anti-Grain Geometry C++ library, developed by the late Maxim Shemanarev. I wrote some code to render simple primitives necessary for a Line Graph. Although Swift Package Manager can compile C++ code, C++ functions aren’t directly accessible from Swift code. So I had to write a bridging C-headers. You can call the C-functions from Swift directly which in turn call the C++ functions. You can find the implementation here.

One other aim of implementing different rendering backends was to facilitate adding more backends in the future. This required all the Renderers to have some main stuff in common. So I made a Renderer protocol that included the main functions that every Renderer must have. Each Renderer will have to conform to that protocol. 

The AGGRenderer worked fine apart from one thing. The plot dimensions and and therefore the buffer size were hard coded. This meant that the user couldn’t change the size of the image rendered. This was obviously a big handicap to the end user. But for the moment I decided to focus on implementing the plot and getting the basic structure up and running. I could deal with it later on.

The other Renderer I planned to implement was a simple SVGRenderer written in Swift. The implementation is pretty simple and straightforward just like the SVG format. It has a String variable that will describe the image. Whenever you need to draw a primitive you pass the data to the SVGRenderer and it concatenates the relevant tag to the String. In the end the Renderer saves the String into a .svg file. 

We’re talking about passing the plotting data to the Renderer, but how does that happen? I have defined a Point type which is a struct. It contains two Floats, x and y.  You can pass the plotting data to the Renderer in the form of Point variable, or Point arrays. But the end user need not worry about this. All this will be handled by the Plots. Which brings us to the LineGraph implementation.

What I noticed first was that each plot would have to have the support of being a SubPlot. Therefore the renderer would need each image and plot to have separate dimensions in case of a SubPlot.  Lets take an example of two SubPlots stacked horizontally. An easy way to go about it would be to do all the plot calculations of each plot in its own independent co-ordinate system and the shift the origin of each plot as required while drawing it.So what I did was create a Plot protocol with a PlotDimensions type that held the image size and the dimesions of the current plot being rendered, and two offset variables, xOffset and yOffset respectively. In this case the xOffset of the second SubPlot will be a positive number and the yOffset will be zero for both of them. The plot dimensions will be equal divisions of the net image space available to all the Sub Plots. The Renderer will just shift the origin of each SubPlot by (xOffset, yOffset). This did the job. 

The Plot protocol has just one more method called drawGraph(). This was because each Plot had to have the functionality to just draw the plot in memory irrespective of what mode of output(like saving images in case of AGG, or displaying an image in a window in case an OpenGL implementation was written) the used Renderer would have. Also this facilitated drawing each SubPlot separately to the image before generating the final output. 

Then I took the plotting logic from my prototype and the basic Line Graph was done. 

The next step was to set up the tests. I created an examples directory with individual executable modules, each demonstrating a single feature. In this directory I made a Reference directory with two separate directories for AGG and SVG renders. So that anyone could run all the tests easily in one go, I made a simple bash script with the commands to run each example like so:

swift run <Executable Example Module Name>

Then came the time to let the users show the plots in a Jupyter Notebook. Initially the way I did this was, save the image as usual using the AGGRenderer, re read it from the disk encode it to base64 in C++ code, and send back the String to Swift code. But there was a better way that my mentors suggested. The library that I was using to encode PNGs, lodepng, allowed you to encode the image in memory and not save it to the disk. I could return a pointer to a buffer with the encoded bytes, to the Swift code and use some functions under Foundation to do the base64 encoding in Swift itself. This could come in handy sometime later if another Renderer could generate images that coudl be encoded to base64. I did the encoding using a function like this:

public func encodeBase64PNG(pngBufferPointer: UnsafePointer<UInt8>, bufferSize: Int) -> String {    let pngBuffer : NSData = NSData(bytes: pngBufferPointer, length: bufferSize)    return pngBuffer.base64EncodedString(options: .lineLength64Characters) }

To display the image in Jupyter I added these lines to the EnableIPythonDisplay.swift file in the swift-jupyter repository:

func display(base64EncodedPNG: String) {  let displayImage = Python.import("IPython.display")  let codecs = Python.import("codecs")  let imageData = codecs.decode(Python.bytes(base64EncodedPNG, encoding: "utf8"), encoding: "base64")  displayImage.Image(data: imageData, format: "png").display() }

To display the plot the only thing the user has to do is to include this file in their jupyter notebook, get the base64 image from the plot object and pass it to the display function.

This completed all the main stuff I had planned for my first milestone well before the deadline. By this time the official coding period hadn’t started yet. The first deadline was June 24 and I had almost a month left. I could cover a lot more stuff in my first milestone itself, so I decided to complete the Line Plot and keep at least the Bar Chart implementation in my first milestone.

You can find all the code here.

This post has already gotten pretty long, so I’ll sign off here. I’ll be discussing the rest of my Line Graph implementation, Bar Chart implementation and how setting up the tests beforehand helped me avoid a bug, all in my next post.

Stay tuned!

PS: Don’t forget to subscribe to the Swift for TensorFlow newsletter to stay up to date with the work being done and the happenings of the S4TF community!

Here’s the link: https://www.s4tfnews.com/

PPS: Also recently a Swift for TensorFlow Special Interest Group has been announced to help steer the framework. Weekly meetings will be held discussion the progress and plan ahead. Anyone interested can sign up to the mailing list here.

[inexcon]

RSI Comm-Link: Star Citizen Monthly Report: February 2019

February saw Cloud Imperium devs around the world working hard to deliver the incredible content for the soon-to-be-released Alpha 3.5 patch. Progress was made everywhere, from locations like ArcCorp to the gameplay developments afforded by the New Flight Model. Read on for the full lowdown from February’s global workload.

Star Citizen Monthly Report: February 2019

AI – Character

February’s roundup starts with the AI Team, who made improvements to the existing character collision avoidance system. The changes began with adjustments to the smooth locomotion path, with the data now coming from the collision avoidance calculation to make sure the character has enough free space.

Time was spent generalizing the options a vendor can use so that designers no longer have to write them into the behaviors. Instead, the correct options are automatically selected based on the environment and (eventually) from the shop services.

They’re also restricting combat behavior to allow better scalability when adding new tactics and are investigating some of the bugs found in the Alpha 3.4 release.

AI – Ships

Throughout February, the AI Team improved various aspects of dogfighting gameplay, including evasive maneuvers. Now, when an AI pilot has an enemy on its tail, it will try to utilize different break-aways with increasing and varied angles. It will also try to keep momentum and chain together attack maneuvers. To achieve this, the team exposed new ‘SmoothTurning’ subsumption tasks to the behavior logic.

When detecting enemy fire, AI pilots will utilize evasive maneuvers to create a diversion.

They also implemented automatic incoming/outgoing ship traffic over planetary landing areas. They are currently generalizing ship behaviors to enable the designers to easily set up traffic on multiple cities, capital ships, and so on.

Animation

Last month, Animation provided the remaining animation sets for previous characters already found in the Persistent Universe (PU), including Hurston, Battaglia, and Pacheco. They also finished off a new batch of animations for the ship dealer. Work continues on animations for future yet-to-be-announced characters too, which includes getting approval for the initial poses and animations before going forward with the final clean-up.

American Sign Language (ASL) emotes are being added to the game and are currently being improved with the addition of facial animations.

Finally, Animation is currently syncing with Cinematics for a few interesting segments that backers will get to enjoy soon…

Art – Tech

Tech Art invested significant effort into optimizing rig assets so that they work better with the facial runtime rig logic and the ‘look at’ and ‘mocap’ re-direction components. Since eye contact is one of the fundamental means of human communication, any error or tiny deviation can cause the ‘uncanny valley’ effect and immediately break immersion.

“If the eyes of an actor converge just slightly too much, they appear cross-eyed. However, if they don’t converge enough, they appear to look through you, as if distracted. If the eyelids occlude the character’s iris just a little too much, which, depending on the distance, could amount to just 2-3 pixels vertically, they look sleepy or bored. Conversely, if they expose too much of the cornea, they appear more alert, surprised, or outright creepy.”

So, the alignment of the virtual skeleton’s eye joints with respect to the eyeball and eyelid geometry is of utmost importance. Likewise, the ‘look-at’ system needs to control all relevant rig parameters and corrective blendshapes (not just the rotation of the eyeballs themselves) to create truly-believable runtime re-directions of the mocap animations.

Alongside facial work, the team completed several weapons-related tasks, such as fixing offsets during reload animations and locomotion issues for the pistol set. They also completed R&D related to playing animations in sync with character usables within cinematic scenes and helped Design to unify the character tags in Mannequin.

Art – Environment

Predictably, the Environment Team is racing towards the completion of ArcCorp and Area 18 – they’re currently working with and implementing the custom advertising provided by the UI department. The planet itself is in the final art stage and now includes skyscrapers rising above the no-fly zone to provide the player with landing opportunities and interesting buildings to fly around.

Concurrently, the ‘Hi-Tech’ common elements are steadily progressing, with the transit, habitation, and security areas all moving to the art pass stage. Players will see these common elements (alongside garages and hangars) when they’re added to microTech’s landing zone, New Babbage.

The new transit connection between Lorville’s Teasa spaceport and the Central Business District (CBD) is almost ready for travellers. This route will allow players to move directly between the two locations and bypass L19, cutting travel time for high-end shoppers.

Work on organics is ongoing, as are improvements to planet tech, with the artists hard at work creating a library of exotic-looking flora to fill the biomes of New Babbage with. Players can see it for themselves towards the end of the year.

The community can also look forward to upcoming information on the early work the team has done on procedural caves.

Audio

Both the Audio Code Team and the sound designers finished their work on the new camera-shake and ship-vibration systems. Now, when an engine kicks in, the ship shakes and hums. This also extends to the player, with events like a ship powering up causing minor camera shake.

The sound designers also added new sound samples to a range of ships as part of the rollout of the New Flight Model. By adding ‘one-shot’ samples to each of the various thrusters, they brought out more complexity in the sounds heard during flight.

The Audio Team spent the majority of the month creating the sounds of Area 18. Due to the melting pot of ideas and themes present in the new area, the sound designers tested new methods to bring out the unique atmosphere. Additionally, they created the sound profiles and samples for the Gemini S71 assault rifle and Kastak Arms CODA pistol, both of which will appear in the PU and SQ42.

Currently, the Audio Code Team is working towards an updated tool that better allows the sound designers to implement created assets in-engine whilst simultaneously testing how they sound.

Backend Services

Backend Services continued to lay the foundation for the new diffusion network to help scalability for the backend structure of the game. Emphasis is on ensuring the Dedicated Game Servers (DGS) correctly connect to the new diffusion services, particularly the variable, leaderboard, and account services.

February marked the near-end of work on the new Item Cache Service (a massive portion of the backend has now turned micro-service) and began the end-point between DGS and this service, too. As work is completed on the new diffusion services, testing will ensure a smooth transition to the new network.

Support was also added for subsumption services to read directly into the DataCore P4k system for increased efficiency and unification.

With the approaching publish of Alpha 3.5, Backend Services began work on logistics, syncing closely with DevOps to ensure that new services are up and running correctly while maintaining legacy services where necessary.

Community

The team celebrated Valentine’s Day with community-made cards and limited-time ship offers, including Anvil’s F7C-M Heartseeker – a special version of the Super Hornet shooting straight for the heart. During the Be my Valentine greeting card contest, most Citizens got creative with their favorite image editing software, though some went old-school with scissors and crayons to create fantastic crafts to share their love across the galaxy.

Also this month, Argo Astronautics released their latest addition to the ‘verse, the SRV. The ‘Standard Recovery Vehicle’ is built for tugging ships, ground vehicles, and massive cargo containers through the stars using its integrated tractor tech. If you’re looking for more information about this rough and rugged ship, head to the Q&A that answers questions voted-on by the community. As a bonus, Shipmaster General John Crewe stopped by Reverse the Verse LIVE for some in-depth tug-talk.

In the February issue of Jump Point (our subscriber-exclusive magazine), Ben Lesnick took a detailed dive into the ARGO SRV’s design process and went on a worker’s tour of Hurston. The Narrative Team also introduced us to the Human holiday Stella Fortuna and shed light on the history of the revered Rust Society.

A major update to the Star Citizen roadmap gave a look at what’s coming to the Persistent Universe in 2019 and what can be expected in upcoming releases.

Released in January, but worthy of another mention, is the official Star Citizen Fankit, which was put together to help all of you share your enthusiasm and engagement. Star Citizen lives by the support it receives from the community, so take a look at this treasure trove of assets and get creating!

The team is also excited to announce that our physical merchandise will soon be receiving a well-deserved face-lift. Having received a lot of feedback over the years, it’s clear that Citizens are passionate about merch and to make the store experience the best it can be, your input was needed. Thanks to everyone who contributed feedback to our thread on Spectrum!

Content – Characters

The Character Team revisited the hair development pipeline in February. With the help of the Graphics Team, they developed new tools and shader tech to improve the realism of hair while maintaining quality and performance. More work went into mission-giver Pacheco, including textures and rigging, with her hairstyle being used to trial the new hair pipeline. Work continues on the assets required for DNA implementation and the female player character, while refinement of the Xi’an concept is making great progress.

Design

Throughout February, Design focused on implementing Area 18’s shops, NPCs, and usables. Last month marked the end of implementation, with March being used for polish to ensure a believable and immersive experience upon release. The team also gained a new member to help with mission implementation and improvement, who is currently setting their sights on the Emergency Communication Network (ECN) mission set.

Regarding the economy, the US Design Team worked with their UK counterparts on the objective criteria and value of objects in-game, laying down the track for acquiring item properties and their values. A system was built to help create an abstract representation, which is both robust and modular enough to allow easy adjustment in the future when the details are finalized.

DevOps

DevOps had a busy month working on the build system and pipeline that supports feature stream development. After several long nights, they rolled out the upgrades and have been happy with the results so far – internal systems are running smoothly without errors and each evolution improves efficiency and storage consumption.

They’re now attempting to further compress existing data which, when multiplied by hundreds of thousands of individual files, will make a real impact to the dev’s daily development efforts.

Engineering

February saw the Engine Team spend time on general Alpha 3.5 support, such as profiling, optimization, and bug fixing. They also improved the instance system used in compute skinning and refactored it on the CPU and shader for better maintainability, created a budget-based output-buffer system for skinning results (so they only have to skin once per frame), made more tangent reconstruction optimizations, and worked on wrap-deformation using the color stream.

Basic HDR display support was added to the editor, as was a new hue-preserving display mapping curve suitable for HDR display output. The team provided material layer support for planet tech v4 and continued to improve character hair, which included initial hair mask, support for edge masking, and pixel depth offset. Game physics is progressing with Projectile Manager 2.0, as well as optimizations to wrapped grids and state updates. Support was added for ocean Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) wave generation to physics buoyancy calculations, as well as exposed optimized terrain meshes.

A major system initialization clean-up was completed as part of an initiative to share core engine functionality with PU services, work began on the lockless job manager (a complete overhaul for faster response in high-load scenarios), and a new load time profiler was created. The team are currently wrapping up the ‘ImGUI’ integration and introducing a temporary allocator for more efficiency when containers are used on stack.

They made the switch to the Clang 6 compiler to build Linux targets (including compilation cleanup of the entire code base) and plan to switch to the latest stable release (Clang 8.x) in the near future.

Finally, they finished a ‘create compile time’ analysis tool (utilizing new Visual C++ front and backend profiler flags) to gather, condense, and visualize reasons for slow compile and link times. As a result, various improvements have already been submitted and further action-items defined.

Features – Gameplay

A large portion of Gameplay Feature’s month was dedicated to implementing the new DNA feature into the character customizer. In addition, the team was responsible for creating and setting up the user interface (UI) and accommodating the female playable character, both of which are scheduled for Alpha 3.5.

Another major focus was on video streaming for comms calls, which consisted of a refactor of the comms component to utilize the voice service call mechanism. Research was made into the VP9 streaming format and video streaming improvements were completed that will be rolled out in the upcoming release.

Lastly, support was given to the US-based Vehicle Features Team, with updates to the turret sensitivity HUD, gimbal assist UI, and the shopping service entity registration.

Features – Vehicles

Gimbal Assist and its related HUD improvements were finalized and polished, allowing for better balancing of this new weapon control scheme. Turrets were also improved, as the team added a HUD and keybinds for input sensitivity, implemented adjustable speeds for gimbal target movement based on proximity to center aim, and fixed bugs with snapping and erratic movement.

A lot of work went into scanning improvements, which included adjusting the area for navpoint scanning, enabling use of the navpoint hierarchy, and adding a Boolean to opt into the scanning data. This endeavor also covered adjustments to make scanning more involving by setting up AI turrets to generate signatures and be scannable and adding specific icons for scanned/unscanned targets. Ping and blob were implemented to display on the radar too, including focus angle and ping fire.

To round out the month, they continuing to make item port tech optimizations, developed tech for utilizing geometry component tags in the paint system, and fixed a handful of crash bugs.

Graphics

Last month, the Graphics Team’s work on the PU was spread between several smaller tasks. There were many shader requests from the artists, such as adding new features to the hard surface shader and ISO support for decals in the forward rendering pipeline.

The team also continued with the CPU optimizations from last month. This included a 3x performance saving on the cost of building per-instance data buffers for the GPU and better support for the depth pre-pass to help occlude hidden parts of the frame with less CPU overheads.

To help the artists optimize their content, the team worked on an improved render-debugging tool that reports how many draw instructions (draw-call) a particular object requires along with a breakdown of why each instruction was needed. Once complete, this will allow the artists to dig into their material and mesh setups to save valuable CPU time.

Level Design

The Level Design Team soldiered on with ArcCorp’s Area 18, bringing the designer whitebox up to greybox. They began planning the modular space stations that will be built this year too, including looking at the libraries, rooms, and content that goes into them. The procedural tool is also now at a stage where they can slowly start ramping up the modular station production.

Live Design

The Live Team refactored existing missions to make them scalable to make more content available in the planetary system (other than Crusader). Significant progress was made on a new drug-stealing mission for Twitch Pacheco, as well as a BlackJack Security counter-mission that tasks less morally-corrupt players with destroying the stash.

Another focus was on implementing a variety of encounters with security forces and bounty hunters when the player holds a high crime stat.

As well as practical work, time was taken to define the next tier of many aspects of the law system, such as punishment, paying fines, bounty hunting, and so on.

Lighting

Last month, the Lighting Team focused on developing the look of Area 18. Lighting Area 18 is a mixture of clean-up work from the previous versions to match new standards and lighting the new exterior layout to a series of targets set by the Art Director. The team is working closely with the Environment Art and VFX teams to ensure that new advertising assets and visual effects ‘pop’ from the environment and provide interesting and varied visuals.

Narrative

Working closely with the Environment Art and Mission Design teams, February saw the Narrative Team further fleshing out of lore relating to ArcCorp and its moons. From new mission giver contract text to the catchy slogans gracing Area 18’s numerous billboards, a lot of additional lore was created to bring these locations to life.

Additionally, expanded wildline sets for security pilots, bounty hunters, and combat assist pilots were scripted and recorded. The AI and Mission teams will use these sets to begin prototyping and testing out new gameplay for inclusion in future builds.

Also, the Narrative Team made progress on generating the specific text needed for on-screen mission objectives. Currently, this is placeholder text from the designers who worked on levels, but moving forward, the hope is to begin using the proper in-lore objectives.

Player Relations

The Player Relations Team was busy preparing for Alpha 3.5 (including getting ready to test the New Flight Model) as well as boxing off the work created over the holiday period.

“As always, we’d like to point all players to our growing Knowledge Base, which now has 120+ articles and saw almost 450,000 visitors this month! We will continue to grow this by adding more ‘How To’ articles, patch notes, and live service notifications there as well as on Spectrum.”

Props

February saw headway into Area 18’s props: the core street furniture is now in and the team has moved onto the dressing pass, adding in new assets to give life to the streets, alleyways, and landing zone.

As the month closed out, the team jumped into release mode to get a head start squashing bugs and generally tightening up the upcoming release.

QA

Things ramped up on the publishing side in February as the team prepared Alpha 3.5 for the Evocati and PTU. Testing continues on the New Flight Model and other systems as they come online, such as the new weapons, ships, and locations. QA leadership continues to train the newer testers and improve the overall testing process.

The AI Feature Team kept the Frankfurt-based QA testers busy with new features, such as the improved avoidance system and new break-away maneuvers. Testing mainly consists of making sure they’re working as intended, as well as noting visible improvements to what was already in place (in the case of the avoidance system). Combat AI received perception updates which were tested by QA to address issues where the FPS AI would not recognize the player being present in their vicinity.

On the backend, changes to the subsumption visualizer are being tested to ensure no new issues have been introduced in preparation for their full integration into the editor. Testing for ArcCorp and Area 18 is currently underway too.

The Universe Team discovered that mining entities were not appearing in the client due to discrepancies in how they were spawned in the server. This was tracked down and fixed, though testing will continue to make sure it’s working as intended.

Ships

The Vehicle Content Team wrapped up the MISC Reliant Mako, Tana, and Sen variants for Alpha 3.5. They’re now in testing with QA who are addressing bugs before the vehicles go live. The designers and tech artists have been busy with the Origin 300i, which will reach QA for testing in the near future.

Back in the UK, the team continued production on the 890 Jump, bringing more rooms into the final art stage from greybox (including the hangar area). The Carrack is heading towards a greybox-complete state and select areas are being polished for review.

Development continues on the Banu Defender which is utilizing a new style of production that caters to its organic art style. ZBrush is being used to sculpt the interior before transferring the high-density model to 3ds Max, where it is then rebuilt (low-poly) for the game engine. A large portion of the exterior greybox is complete and looking fantastic.

Last but by no means least, the interior updates to the Vanguard wrapped up with essentially the entire area from the cockpit seat backwards being completely redone. This is more than was initially anticipated, but the team feels that it’s worth it. Now that the interior rework has been finalized and the framework for the variants agreed upon, the Ship Team can start on the exterior changes to accommodate them and continue with the variant-specific items.

System Design

The System Design Team is working on improving and upgrading the no-fly zones used across ArcCorp. Since the existing system now needs to support an entire planet, it has proven quite a challenge.

For social AI, the team’s working on unifying vendor behaviors and making sure they’re built in a modular fashion. For example, the team can easily graft new actions onto the base behavior of a shop keeper to allow them to pick up objects, give them to the player, and interact with things on the counter without having to build new ones from scratch.

As with social AI, the team focused on restructuring FPS AI behaviors to make them more modular, with the goal to make it easier to implement specific chunks of logic. For mining, they added new mineable rocks on ArcCorp’s moons. Wala in particular will have a new type of rock that fits better with the crystalline formations available on the moon.

Finally for System Design, AI traffic over Area 18 is currently being developed. The team’s starting small, with a few ships landing and taking off around the spaceport, but they’re also investigating ways to expand it while being mindful of performance.

Turbulent

RSI Platform: On February 14th, Turbulent supported the announcement of a new flyable variant of the Super Hornet, the F7C-M Heartseeker. They also made major updates to the CMS backend which required all hands on deck.

Services: This month’s game service work was focused around developing support for transporting video streams over the comms channels. This will allow the streaming of a user’s face/in-game texture to another player outside of the bind culling bubble, enabling in-game video calls over wider distances. This method also enables the transmission of in-game video streams to web clients.

Turbulent spent considerable time standardizing services to enable them to run within a new local development environment. This will allow the entire Star Citizen universe’s services to run locally on dev systems to develop and iterate with the entire stack.

The Turbulent Services Team also began work on an administration interface for game designers and game operators to display real-time information about the state of the universe. This application can display information about groups, lobbies, and voice channels along with details of online players, quantum routes, and probability volumes.

UI

As in January, UI supported the Environment Team with in-fiction advertising and branding for Area 18, including animation and hologram textures. They also made headway on the 3D area map using the concepts shown last month as visual targets. Finally, they began working out how to bring the rental functionality from the Arena Commander frontend to in-game consoles in Area 18.

VFX

The VFX Team updated the existing particle lighting system to a more modern system. The previous version was based on tessellation, which increased the rendering cost and had limitations on shadow resolution. The new one is a global change that will remove the need for tessellation and improve shadow receiving for crisper, smoother shadows. ArcCorp’s Lyria and Wala will be the first moons to use this new particle lighting system when it’s ready for deployment. It will help the particles integrate into the moons more realistically and address issues when the particles have long shadows going through them, such as during sunrise and sunset.

They also continued to iterate on thruster damage effects and began rolling it out to all ships.

Several new weapon effects were worked on, including a new ballistic hand cannon and ballistic assault rifle. They also carried out extensive visual exploration for the new Tachyon energy weapon class.

Finally, significant time was invested in improving the VFX editor’s UI layout and functionality. Although not as glamorous as planet dressing and effects, improving the quality-of-life for artists is important and helps them to work faster too.

Weapons

The Weapon Art Team completed the Gemini S71, Kastak Arms Coda, Banu Singe Tachyon cannons, Gallenson Tactical ballistic cannon reworks, and five variants of the Aegis Vanguard nose guns.

Conclusion

WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…

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[sad-ch1ld]

via RSI Comm-Link

February saw Cloud Imperium devs around the world working hard to deliver the incredible content for the soon-to-be-released Alpha 3.5 patch. Progress was made everywhere, from locations like ArcCorp to the gameplay developments afforded by the New Flight Model. Read on for the full lowdown from February’s global workload.

Star Citizen Monthly Report: February 2019

AI – Character

February’s roundup starts with the AI Team, who made improvements to the existing character collision avoidance system. The changes began with adjustments to the smooth locomotion path, with the data now coming from the collision avoidance calculation to make sure the character has enough free space.

Time was spent generalizing the options a vendor can use so that designers no longer have to write them into the behaviors. Instead, the correct options are automatically selected based on the environment and (eventually) from the shop services.

They’re also restricting combat behavior to allow better scalability when adding new tactics and are investigating some of the bugs found in the Alpha 3.4 release.

AI – Ships

Throughout February, the AI Team improved various aspects of dogfighting gameplay, including evasive maneuvers. Now, when an AI pilot has an enemy on its tail, it will try to utilize different break-aways with increasing and varied angles. It will also try to keep momentum and chain together attack maneuvers. To achieve this, the team exposed new ‘SmoothTurning’ subsumption tasks to the behavior logic.

When detecting enemy fire, AI pilots will utilize evasive maneuvers to create a diversion.

They also implemented automatic incoming/outgoing ship traffic over planetary landing areas. They are currently generalizing ship behaviors to enable the designers to easily set up traffic on multiple cities, capital ships, and so on.

Animation

Last month, Animation provided the remaining animation sets for previous characters already found in the Persistent Universe (PU), including Hurston, Battaglia, and Pacheco. They also finished off a new batch of animations for the ship dealer. Work continues on animations for future yet-to-be-announced characters too, which includes getting approval for the initial poses and animations before going forward with the final clean-up.

American Sign Language (ASL) emotes are being added to the game and are currently being improved with the addition of facial animations.

Finally, Animation is currently syncing with Cinematics for a few interesting segments that backers will get to enjoy soon…

Art – Tech

Tech Art invested significant effort into optimizing rig assets so that they work better with the facial runtime rig logic and the ‘look at’ and ‘mocap’ re-direction components. Since eye contact is one of the fundamental means of human communication, any error or tiny deviation can cause the ‘uncanny valley’ effect and immediately break immersion.

“If the eyes of an actor converge just slightly too much, they appear cross-eyed. However, if they don’t converge enough, they appear to look through you, as if distracted. If the eyelids occlude the character’s iris just a little too much, which, depending on the distance, could amount to just 2-3 pixels vertically, they look sleepy or bored. Conversely, if they expose too much of the cornea, they appear more alert, surprised, or outright creepy.”

So, the alignment of the virtual skeleton’s eye joints with respect to the eyeball and eyelid geometry is of utmost importance. Likewise, the ‘look-at’ system needs to control all relevant rig parameters and corrective blendshapes (not just the rotation of the eyeballs themselves) to create truly-believable runtime re-directions of the mocap animations.

Alongside facial work, the team completed several weapons-related tasks, such as fixing offsets during reload animations and locomotion issues for the pistol set. They also completed R&D related to playing animations in sync with character usables within cinematic scenes and helped Design to unify the character tags in Mannequin.

Art – Environment

Predictably, the Environment Team is racing towards the completion of ArcCorp and Area 18 – they’re currently working with and implementing the custom advertising provided by the UI department. The planet itself is in the final art stage and now includes skyscrapers rising above the no-fly zone to provide the player with landing opportunities and interesting buildings to fly around.

Concurrently, the ‘Hi-Tech’ common elements are steadily progressing, with the transit, habitation, and security areas all moving to the art pass stage. Players will see these common elements (alongside garages and hangars) when they’re added to microTech’s landing zone, New Babbage.

The new transit connection between Lorville’s Teasa spaceport and the Central Business District (CBD) is almost ready for travellers. This route will allow players to move directly between the two locations and bypass L19, cutting travel time for high-end shoppers.

Work on organics is ongoing, as are improvements to planet tech, with the artists hard at work creating a library of exotic-looking flora to fill the biomes of New Babbage with. Players can see it for themselves towards the end of the year.

The community can also look forward to upcoming information on the early work the team has done on procedural caves.

Audio

Both the Audio Code Team and the sound designers finished their work on the new camera-shake and ship-vibration systems. Now, when an engine kicks in, the ship shakes and hums. This also extends to the player, with events like a ship powering up causing minor camera shake.

The sound designers also added new sound samples to a range of ships as part of the rollout of the New Flight Model. By adding ‘one-shot’ samples to each of the various thrusters, they brought out more complexity in the sounds heard during flight.

The Audio Team spent the majority of the month creating the sounds of Area 18. Due to the melting pot of ideas and themes present in the new area, the sound designers tested new methods to bring out the unique atmosphere. Additionally, they created the sound profiles and samples for the Gemini S71 assault rifle and Kastak Arms CODA pistol, both of which will appear in the PU and SQ42.

Currently, the Audio Code Team is working towards an updated tool that better allows the sound designers to implement created assets in-engine whilst simultaneously testing how they sound.

Backend Services

Backend Services continued to lay the foundation for the new diffusion network to help scalability for the backend structure of the game. Emphasis is on ensuring the Dedicated Game Servers (DGS) correctly connect to the new diffusion services, particularly the variable, leaderboard, and account services.

February marked the near-end of work on the new Item Cache Service (a massive portion of the backend has now turned micro-service) and began the end-point between DGS and this service, too. As work is completed on the new diffusion services, testing will ensure a smooth transition to the new network.

Support was also added for subsumption services to read directly into the DataCore P4k system for increased efficiency and unification.

With the approaching publish of Alpha 3.5, Backend Services began work on logistics, syncing closely with DevOps to ensure that new services are up and running correctly while maintaining legacy services where necessary.

Community

The team celebrated Valentine’s Day with community-made cards and limited-time ship offers, including Anvil’s F7C-M Heartseeker – a special version of the Super Hornet shooting straight for the heart. During the Be my Valentine greeting card contest, most Citizens got creative with their favorite image editing software, though some went old-school with scissors and crayons to create fantastic crafts to share their love across the galaxy.

Also this month, Argo Astronautics released their latest addition to the ‘verse, the SRV. The ‘Standard Recovery Vehicle’ is built for tugging ships, ground vehicles, and massive cargo containers through the stars using its integrated tractor tech. If you’re looking for more information about this rough and rugged ship, head to the Q&A that answers questions voted-on by the community. As a bonus, Shipmaster General John Crewe stopped by Reverse the Verse LIVE for some in-depth tug-talk.

In the February issue of Jump Point (our subscriber-exclusive magazine), Ben Lesnick took a detailed dive into the ARGO SRV’s design process and went on a worker’s tour of Hurston. The Narrative Team also introduced us to the Human holiday Stella Fortuna and shed light on the history of the revered Rust Society.

A major update to the Star Citizen roadmap gave a look at what’s coming to the Persistent Universe in 2019 and what can be expected in upcoming releases.

Released in January, but worthy of another mention, is the official Star Citizen Fankit, which was put together to help all of you share your enthusiasm and engagement. Star Citizen lives by the support it receives from the community, so take a look at this treasure trove of assets and get creating!

The team is also excited to announce that our physical merchandise will soon be receiving a well-deserved face-lift. Having received a lot of feedback over the years, it’s clear that Citizens are passionate about merch and to make the store experience the best it can be, your input was needed. Thanks to everyone who contributed feedback to our thread on Spectrum!

Content – Characters

The Character Team revisited the hair development pipeline in February. With the help of the Graphics Team, they developed new tools and shader tech to improve the realism of hair while maintaining quality and performance. More work went into mission-giver Pacheco, including textures and rigging, with her hairstyle being used to trial the new hair pipeline. Work continues on the assets required for DNA implementation and the female player character, while refinement of the Xi’an concept is making great progress.

Design

Throughout February, Design focused on implementing Area 18’s shops, NPCs, and usables. Last month marked the end of implementation, with March being used for polish to ensure a believable and immersive experience upon release. The team also gained a new member to help with mission implementation and improvement, who is currently setting their sights on the Emergency Communication Network (ECN) mission set.

Regarding the economy, the US Design Team worked with their UK counterparts on the objective criteria and value of objects in-game, laying down the track for acquiring item properties and their values. A system was built to help create an abstract representation, which is both robust and modular enough to allow easy adjustment in the future when the details are finalized.

DevOps

DevOps had a busy month working on the build system and pipeline that supports feature stream development. After several long nights, they rolled out the upgrades and have been happy with the results so far – internal systems are running smoothly without errors and each evolution improves efficiency and storage consumption.

They’re now attempting to further compress existing data which, when multiplied by hundreds of thousands of individual files, will make a real impact to the dev’s daily development efforts.

Engineering

February saw the Engine Team spend time on general Alpha 3.5 support, such as profiling, optimization, and bug fixing. They also improved the instance system used in compute skinning and refactored it on the CPU and shader for better maintainability, created a budget-based output-buffer system for skinning results (so they only have to skin once per frame), made more tangent reconstruction optimizations, and worked on wrap-deformation using the color stream.

Basic HDR display support was added to the editor, as was a new hue-preserving display mapping curve suitable for HDR display output. The team provided material layer support for planet tech v4 and continued to improve character hair, which included initial hair mask, support for edge masking, and pixel depth offset. Game physics is progressing with Projectile Manager 2.0, as well as optimizations to wrapped grids and state updates. Support was added for ocean Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) wave generation to physics buoyancy calculations, as well as exposed optimized terrain meshes.

A major system initialization clean-up was completed as part of an initiative to share core engine functionality with PU services, work began on the lockless job manager (a complete overhaul for faster response in high-load scenarios), and a new load time profiler was created. The team are currently wrapping up the ‘ImGUI’ integration and introducing a temporary allocator for more efficiency when containers are used on stack.

They made the switch to the Clang 6 compiler to build Linux targets (including compilation cleanup of the entire code base) and plan to switch to the latest stable release (Clang 8.x) in the near future.

Finally, they finished a ‘create compile time’ analysis tool (utilizing new Visual C++ front and backend profiler flags) to gather, condense, and visualize reasons for slow compile and link times. As a result, various improvements have already been submitted and further action-items defined.

Features – Gameplay

A large portion of Gameplay Feature’s month was dedicated to implementing the new DNA feature into the character customizer. In addition, the team was responsible for creating and setting up the user interface (UI) and accommodating the female playable character, both of which are scheduled for Alpha 3.5.

Another major focus was on video streaming for comms calls, which consisted of a refactor of the comms component to utilize the voice service call mechanism. Research was made into the VP9 streaming format and video streaming improvements were completed that will be rolled out in the upcoming release.

Lastly, support was given to the US-based Vehicle Features Team, with updates to the turret sensitivity HUD, gimbal assist UI, and the shopping service entity registration.

Features – Vehicles

Gimbal Assist and its related HUD improvements were finalized and polished, allowing for better balancing of this new weapon control scheme. Turrets were also improved, as the team added a HUD and keybinds for input sensitivity, implemented adjustable speeds for gimbal target movement based on proximity to center aim, and fixed bugs with snapping and erratic movement.

A lot of work went into scanning improvements, which included adjusting the area for navpoint scanning, enabling use of the navpoint hierarchy, and adding a Boolean to opt into the scanning data. This endeavor also covered adjustments to make scanning more involving by setting up AI turrets to generate signatures and be scannable and adding specific icons for scanned/unscanned targets. Ping and blob were implemented to display on the radar too, including focus angle and ping fire.

To round out the month, they continuing to make item port tech optimizations, developed tech for utilizing geometry component tags in the paint system, and fixed a handful of crash bugs.

Graphics

Last month, the Graphics Team’s work on the PU was spread between several smaller tasks. There were many shader requests from the artists, such as adding new features to the hard surface shader and ISO support for decals in the forward rendering pipeline.

The team also continued with the CPU optimizations from last month. This included a 3x performance saving on the cost of building per-instance data buffers for the GPU and better support for the depth pre-pass to help occlude hidden parts of the frame with less CPU overheads.

To help the artists optimize their content, the team worked on an improved render-debugging tool that reports how many draw instructions (draw-call) a particular object requires along with a breakdown of why each instruction was needed. Once complete, this will allow the artists to dig into their material and mesh setups to save valuable CPU time.

Level Design

The Level Design Team soldiered on with ArcCorp’s Area 18, bringing the designer whitebox up to greybox. They began planning the modular space stations that will be built this year too, including looking at the libraries, rooms, and content that goes into them. The procedural tool is also now at a stage where they can slowly start ramping up the modular station production.

Live Design

The Live Team refactored existing missions to make them scalable to make more content available in the planetary system (other than Crusader). Significant progress was made on a new drug-stealing mission for Twitch Pacheco, as well as a BlackJack Security counter-mission that tasks less morally-corrupt players with destroying the stash.

Another focus was on implementing a variety of encounters with security forces and bounty hunters when the player holds a high crime stat.

As well as practical work, time was taken to define the next tier of many aspects of the law system, such as punishment, paying fines, bounty hunting, and so on.

Lighting

Last month, the Lighting Team focused on developing the look of Area 18. Lighting Area 18 is a mixture of clean-up work from the previous versions to match new standards and lighting the new exterior layout to a series of targets set by the Art Director. The team is working closely with the Environment Art and VFX teams to ensure that new advertising assets and visual effects ‘pop’ from the environment and provide interesting and varied visuals.

Narrative

Working closely with the Environment Art and Mission Design teams, February saw the Narrative Team further fleshing out of lore relating to ArcCorp and its moons. From new mission giver contract text to the catchy slogans gracing Area 18’s numerous billboards, a lot of additional lore was created to bring these locations to life.

Additionally, expanded wildline sets for security pilots, bounty hunters, and combat assist pilots were scripted and recorded. The AI and Mission teams will use these sets to begin prototyping and testing out new gameplay for inclusion in future builds.

Also, the Narrative Team made progress on generating the specific text needed for on-screen mission objectives. Currently, this is placeholder text from the designers who worked on levels, but moving forward, the hope is to begin using the proper in-lore objectives.

Player Relations

The Player Relations Team was busy preparing for Alpha 3.5 (including getting ready to test the New Flight Model) as well as boxing off the work created over the holiday period.

“As always, we’d like to point all players to our growing Knowledge Base, which now has 120+ articles and saw almost 450,000 visitors this month! We will continue to grow this by adding more ‘How To’ articles, patch notes, and live service notifications there as well as on Spectrum.”

Props

February saw headway into Area 18’s props: the core street furniture is now in and the team has moved onto the dressing pass, adding in new assets to give life to the streets, alleyways, and landing zone.

As the month closed out, the team jumped into release mode to get a head start squashing bugs and generally tightening up the upcoming release.

QA

Things ramped up on the publishing side in February as the team prepared Alpha 3.5 for the Evocati and PTU. Testing continues on the New Flight Model and other systems as they come online, such as the new weapons, ships, and locations. QA leadership continues to train the newer testers and improve the overall testing process.

The AI Feature Team kept the Frankfurt-based QA testers busy with new features, such as the improved avoidance system and new break-away maneuvers. Testing mainly consists of making sure they’re working as intended, as well as noting visible improvements to what was already in place (in the case of the avoidance system). Combat AI received perception updates which were tested by QA to address issues where the FPS AI would not recognize the player being present in their vicinity.

On the backend, changes to the subsumption visualizer are being tested to ensure no new issues have been introduced in preparation for their full integration into the editor. Testing for ArcCorp and Area 18 is currently underway too.

The Universe Team discovered that mining entities were not appearing in the client due to discrepancies in how they were spawned in the server. This was tracked down and fixed, though testing will continue to make sure it’s working as intended.

Ships

The Vehicle Content Team wrapped up the MISC Reliant Mako, Tana, and Sen variants for Alpha 3.5. They’re now in testing with QA who are addressing bugs before the vehicles go live. The designers and tech artists have been busy with the Origin 300i, which will reach QA for testing in the near future.

Back in the UK, the team continued production on the 890 Jump, bringing more rooms into the final art stage from greybox (including the hangar area). The Carrack is heading towards a greybox-complete state and select areas are being polished for review.

Development continues on the Banu Defender which is utilizing a new style of production that caters to its organic art style. ZBrush is being used to sculpt the interior before transferring the high-density model to 3ds Max, where it is then rebuilt (low-poly) for the game engine. A large portion of the exterior greybox is complete and looking fantastic.

Last but by no means least, the interior updates to the Vanguard wrapped up with essentially the entire area from the cockpit seat backwards being completely redone. This is more than was initially anticipated, but the team feels that it’s worth it. Now that the interior rework has been finalized and the framework for the variants agreed upon, the Ship Team can start on the exterior changes to accommodate them and continue with the variant-specific items.

System Design

The System Design Team is working on improving and upgrading the no-fly zones used across ArcCorp. Since the existing system now needs to support an entire planet, it has proven quite a challenge.

For social AI, the team’s working on unifying vendor behaviors and making sure they’re built in a modular fashion. For example, the team can easily graft new actions onto the base behavior of a shop keeper to allow them to pick up objects, give them to the player, and interact with things on the counter without having to build new ones from scratch.

As with social AI, the team focused on restructuring FPS AI behaviors to make them more modular, with the goal to make it easier to implement specific chunks of logic. For mining, they added new mineable rocks on ArcCorp’s moons. Wala in particular will have a new type of rock that fits better with the crystalline formations available on the moon.

Finally for System Design, AI traffic over Area 18 is currently being developed. The team’s starting small, with a few ships landing and taking off around the spaceport, but they’re also investigating ways to expand it while being mindful of performance.

Turbulent

RSI Platform: On February 14th, Turbulent supported the announcement of a new flyable variant of the Super Hornet, the F7C-M Heartseeker. They also made major updates to the CMS backend which required all hands on deck.

Services: This month’s game service work was focused around developing support for transporting video streams over the comms channels. This will allow the streaming of a user’s face/in-game texture to another player outside of the bind culling bubble, enabling in-game video calls over wider distances. This method also enables the transmission of in-game video streams to web clients.

Turbulent spent considerable time standardizing services to enable them to run within a new local development environment. This will allow the entire Star Citizen universe’s services to run locally on dev systems to develop and iterate with the entire stack.

The Turbulent Services Team also began work on an administration interface for game designers and game operators to display real-time information about the state of the universe. This application can display information about groups, lobbies, and voice channels along with details of online players, quantum routes, and probability volumes.

UI

As in January, UI supported the Environment Team with in-fiction advertising and branding for Area 18, including animation and hologram textures. They also made headway on the 3D area map using the concepts shown last month as visual targets. Finally, they began working out how to bring the rental functionality from the Arena Commander frontend to in-game consoles in Area 18.

VFX

The VFX Team updated the existing particle lighting system to a more modern system. The previous version was based on tessellation, which increased the rendering cost and had limitations on shadow resolution. The new one is a global change that will remove the need for tessellation and improve shadow receiving for crisper, smoother shadows. ArcCorp’s Lyria and Wala will be the first moons to use this new particle lighting system when it’s ready for deployment. It will help the particles integrate into the moons more realistically and address issues when the particles have long shadows going through them, such as during sunrise and sunset.

They also continued to iterate on thruster damage effects and began rolling it out to all ships.

Several new weapon effects were worked on, including a new ballistic hand cannon and ballistic assault rifle. They also carried out extensive visual exploration for the new Tachyon energy weapon class.

Finally, significant time was invested in improving the VFX editor’s UI layout and functionality. Although not as glamorous as planet dressing and effects, improving the quality-of-life for artists is important and helps them to work faster too.

Weapons

The Weapon Art Team completed the Gemini S71, Kastak Arms Coda, Banu Singe Tachyon cannons, Gallenson Tactical ballistic cannon reworks, and five variants of the Aegis Vanguard nose guns.

Conclusion

WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…

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[hellaoldfander86]

The Grey Mage’s Quest Ch. 20

Word Count: 4285

Tags/Warnings: None

Chapter 20: Fairy Visits, Prank Wars, and Tea Parties

Roman quickly put his foot down concerning the “hazing” Foley intended to put Karybdis through. On the scroll handed to Foley by the guide when the two mages first met, was the express order to refrain from pranks until after the fairy visit. To violate the order from Roman would mean a trip to the dungeon to be tossed into the “mages cell” (which absorbed magic) for the duration of the preparations and visit itself. Foley designed the cell himself. He didn’t intend to ignore the order from his prince, so he waited. And planned.

The fairy visit preparations moved along even quicker after Karybdis was brought into the planning. Roman took the mages suggestion that he treat them the same as if they were any other visiting dignitaries, and ran with it. The mage gave the castle cabinet makers the plans to his fairy hutch (he designed it himself) as a template for the new fairy accommodations within the visitor's wing, and even supplied the lights to be installed. The new fairy lodging was installed at shoulder height within a wall between a guest room and a window near the castle gardens after Roman inspected it with a critical eye, and gave the carpenters the nod to go forward with the installation. Being installed next to a window made it easier to make a balcony giving the fae access to the outside and a grand view of the castle gardens in the process. The door to the new rooms was a masterpiece of carved vines. Roman was pleased.

Roman relayed all of this to the other sides as he joined them each night for dinner, telling them about the new quarters for the visitors and all the work that went into them. He also told them of his order to Foley to hold off his “hazing” until after the visit, and his apprehension of what would happen to Karybdis, since he was giving Foley time to plan. Logan assured him that the mage could take care of himself, and not to worry. Roman stayed concerned, he couldn’t help it. He hoped Foley would behave himself, and hoped his threat held some weight. Nonetheless, he had fairies to welcome soon.

The day of the visit was bright and sunny (Roman made sure it was a perfect temperature too), and when the Ambassador arrived, she was greeted by Roman, Foley, and Karybdis inside a conference room with a large table. She was then amazed even further when Roman held out his hand to Karybdis, accepted a potion, climbed up onto the table, and drank it. He shrank down to 8 inches (but still human) and officially welcomed the Ambassador to the castle. The fairy was so touched with the gesture, and couldn’t help herself when she stepped up to Roman and kissed each of his cheeks in a casual fairy greeting. Roman simply smiled and kissed the knuckles of her hand with a bow, as he had done before.

The visit went swimmingly, the fairies loving the quarters within the castle, and were even more grateful when Roman would take the shrinking potion to talk with them. He told them of the end of the quest, and even who was responsible in the first place, which distressed Ambassador Malia, but Roman assured her that he held no ill will towards him, and even gave him a job in the castle. She seemed to accept that, but the royal side was sure she was going to give the mage a piece of her mind when she saw him next. Roman couldn’t help but chuckle at the imagined scene of the 8 inch incensed fairy scolding the full human sized mage. When he told the other sides at dinner that night, they all agreed it would indeed be a humorous sight, accented with chuckles all around when the others imagined the scene for themselves.

When the fairy delegation left, promising to return with volunteers for the castle jobs that Roman had created just for the fairies so they could contribute to the running and security of the realm. They could be messengers and gardeners, and even covert guards, among other things, along with the permanent Ambassador post with its own guards that would increase communication between Roman and the fae. The royal side was content with what he accomplished, with the help of a very reversible common shrinking potion, used in an uncommon way. Plans were immediately implemented to construct lodging for the fae who would be filling the newly created posts within the castle, including a grand ambassadors quarters.

As soon as the fairies were on their way, Roman immediately forbade any of the castle staff to go to the mage’s wing of the castle, to minimize any innocent people being hit by the crossfire. It wasn’t long before loud, strange noises and horrible smells would be emanating from the quarters of the mages as the magical prank war began.

It raged for several days behind closed doors, even Roman staying clear. Every time Karybdis ventured forth from his rooms he would seem unaffected, no warts, boils, or odd colored parts of his body evident. Not even uncontrollable scratching. Only a serene smile whenever the royal side asked about his well being. Foley was conspicuously absent from any realm related meetings, sending Karybdis in his stead. Roman was growing concerned until both mages appeared before him one day, Karybdis unaffected as always, but Foley was a different story. His white flowing beard and hair was an eye-watering bright pink, accented by purple spots all over his scowling face. They both reported that the prank war was over and that Roman could send the cleaning staff back into the mages wing of the castle. The royal side was overjoyed and did so immediately. Karybdis took pity on Foley and reversed his curses, giving Foley his natural coloration back. The two mages became good friends afterward, often traveling to Karybdis’ small cottage on their days off, trading potion recipes and spell notes. Roman was overjoyed that they got along so well, it was well evident that if Foley announced his retirement, who would get the nod to take his place as castle mage.

Now that Karybdis was no longer distracted by diverting any pranks directed at him, Roman gave him the task of coming up with a letter delivery system for his and Logan’s correspondence, since he was sick of carrying Logan’s letters to the mage, which was interrupted by the raging prank war. Something more reliable than the royal side needed to be implemented, that wouldn’t be affected or diverted by an itching curse. The mage went to work.

Roman ended up helping the mage, after learning of the system he wanted to put in place, since he would have to modify the door to the imagination with two shoulder-height mail slots, something the mage knew nothing about, with a catch basket below one on the mind-palace side. The mage came up with a simple system of Logan stamping a rune on the envelope and insert the stamped letter into the mail slot designated “outgoing” in the large oaken door, and on the other side, the rune is immediately activated by the intrinsic magic of the imagination, teleporting it to a special “incoming” mail holder on the mage’s desk with the same rune that is on the letter. When the mage wrote back, he would stamp his letter with another rune, drop it into the “outgoing” mail holder that would teleport it to the other mail slot, which would drop it into the basket in the mind-palace. Logan installed a small sensor that would notify him by vibrating his phone that a letter has been received, along with a blinking light on the basket. It worked flawlessly, and Logan was pleased, and Karybdis and the logical side continued their discussions via “rune post” as Roman began calling it. Logan didn’t think about it too hard. It was Roman’s realm. It was as far from logical it can get.

Roman sat at his desk in his room in the castle and signed the last “royal decree” with a tired flourish, set the pen down, and rubbed his eyes. At last, he would be able to take a break, having finally gotten through the last 2 weeks concerning getting everything rolling concerning whipping the Imagination back into shape. The fairy visit went swimmingly, especially thanks to a suggestion from Karybdis. The “meeting the fae on their level” was an excellent idea, even though Roman was nervous about going back to 8 inches after he finally was back to “relative�� normal, but it did make sense to make the light fae feel welcome and listened to in case they had any complaints. Thankfully, there was none, and Ambassador Malia appreciated the gesture. Now, the royal side was ready for a movie night with the rest of the sides. Popcorn and Disney, Roman’s idea of heaven. He was looking forward to things being less hectic. His bed in the castle was adequate, but he preferred his bed in the mind palace. He can finally sleep soundly knowing that his realm is back up to par. Thomas deserves nothing less. Roman pushes his chair away from the desk, and stands up, stretching his back. It was time to finally spend some time in the mind palace, he missed chatting with the others and Virgil’s snarky wit. The dinners were just not enough. The royal side yawns widely and walks to the door to his room. He could summon the door to the mind palace, but he figured the short stroll to the throne room would be a fine way to stretch his legs before a much-deserved rest.

Virgil sat at the kitchen table in the mind palace, still in his Nightmare Before Christmas fleece sleep pants and a black t-shirt, drawing pad in front of him, a mug of chamomile tea and bottle of water to the left, twirling the pencil with his fingers absentmindedly. The light in the commons was better for drawing, his room being too dark. He hadn’t drawn in years, having in the past only drawn gloomy landscapes, but after he had brought the others back he had the inspiration to draw again. Perhaps a small sliver of creativity still resided in the anxious side, poking him to put memories to paper. He didn’t think about it too hard. It helped him organize his thoughts and relaxed him and his drawings were actually pretty good. He already had a small stack of drawings from after the previous adventure in the subconscious and a few more recent memories in a portfolio next to the drawing pad on the table, some based on actual memories and some that were recreations of what he thought had happened, having not been very aware for the events as they happened. He couldn’t sleep, so here he was once again, sitting at the kitchen table at an ungodly hour to hopefully put some memories to paper to soothe whatever uneasiness was chasing away the urge to sleep, since listening to music had no effect.

He took a sip of tea, ran his hand over the smooth blank page, and made a decision on what to draw. He dove right in, the scratching of the pencil almost soothing as the picture took form in front of him. The minutes flew by as the form took shape on the paper. Putting down the black and choosing another color from the neat lineup of colored pencils next to the pad gave him the pause he needed to crack the top of the bottle of water and take a sip, his teacup suddenly empty, and he wasn’t going to brew more until the picture was done.

“That is quite good.” a voice said behind him, causing the anxious side to clutch at his chest and turn around with a gasp, to find Logan behind him, in his dark blue NASA logo sleep pants and t-shirt, a small smile on his lips. “Apologies, I didn’t intend to alarm you, I was unaware that you could draw.”

The anxious side still had a hand to his chest as he tried to get his breath back. “Uh, yeah, I used to draw landscapes a long time ago but started to draw memories after I brought you guys back. Not entirely sure why, but it relaxes me.”

The logical side hums in understanding and picks up Virgil’s empty Jack Skellington mug. “Let me brew you some more tea. I had come downstairs because I could not sleep to fix a cup of chamomile tea to relax me.”

“Thanks.” The anxious side says as Logan moves to the stove to check the water level in the teakettle, then turning on a burner and setting the teakettle upon it to heat the water within.

“I suppose I am not quite recovered from our adventure in the Imagination,” The logical side says as he opens a cupboard and retrieves his Doctor Who mug (with disappearing TARDIS, just add hot water) and drops a tea bag in both mugs on the counter.

Virgil adds a touch of color to his drawing. “It will take some time. Roman’s had his meeting with the fairies, and I’m sure it will get back to normal soon. He has worked hard to get his realm back in shape.”

“Indeed he has. Karybdis has relayed how hard Roman worked on all that had to be done, with the fae visit and everything else he was working on. He needs a rest.” Logan states as the kettle whistles on the stove and he turns off the burner and pours the hot water into the mugs.

“I think the fairy visit was the turning point. He can breathe easier now that it is out of the way. I’m sure that he can finally get some R and R soon.” Virgil says as he accepts his mug from Logan as the logical side sits at the table, near Virgil’s portfolio.

A door opening and closing upstairs cause both sides to look at each other with raised eyebrows, and the sound of someone coming down the stairs has them turning to see a slightly disheveled Roman wearily appearing at the bottom of the stairs and unceremoniously flopping onto the couch.

“Greetings fellow denizens of the mind palace.” The royal side says with exhaustion practically oozing from his slouched form.

“Heya Princey. You look tired.” Virgil says as he sips his tea.

“Indeed. I feel as though I have battled a manticore-chimera! And believe me when I have said I have actually battled a manticore-chimera. That was the worst decision I have ever made. I barely defeated the beast.” The royal side says with a feeble wave of his hand.

“Would you like some tea, Roman? We just made some, so the water is still hot.” Logan says as he stirs his tea.

“That is a wonderful idea,” Roman says as he wearily gets to his feet and shuffles over to the cupboard and grabs his favorite mug with his shield upon it, and drops in a tea bag. “I wasn’t expecting anyone else to be up at this hour, to tell you the truth.”

“I came down here to draw, since I couldn't sleep, and looks like Logan couldn’t sleep either, so yeah, insomniacs unite! Or whatever.” Virgil says with a small smile.

“No worries! I am enjoying the company, to be honest.” Roman says as he sits down at the table with his tea. “Now that everything is running smoothly, I can get some much-needed rest.”

“We were just discussing that before you arrived,” Logan says as he sets down his mug. “You did throw yourself into getting things in motion soon after you dropped us off at the mind palace after we all returned to normal. Did you get any sleep?”

“Some. I think Karybdis slipped me a nod-off potion at one point since there was a time I didn’t remember going to my quarters in the castle, but that was where I woke up.” Roman mused as he took a sip of tea. “I think that was just before the visit. I caught power naps in between meetings. Plus I managed to give Thomas some good ideas for some short videos. I’m exhausted. Thank goodness things can get back to what we call normal now.”

“Hey, kiddos, having a tea party? Hopefully, I’m not too late to join!” Patton says with a yawn as he descends the last few steps of the stairs, wearing his cat onesie, a fluffy blue blanket draped over his shoulders.

“Virgil and I couldn’t sleep, Roman just arrived from the Imagination. Would you like a cup of tea, Patton?” With the moral sides affirmative nod, Logan moves to the stove to check the water level in the kettle. “It will be a few minutes, the water level is too low. I have to add more.” So Logan does just that and puts the kettle on to boil.

“I’m willing to wait,” Patton says as he moves to the last chair at the table, and in doing so, gets a look at what Virgil had been drawing. ‘Oh, my. That is wonderful!” He gushes.

The moral sides exclamation catches Roman’s attention. “Padre? What…?” Just as the royal side begins to ask his question, he notices what Patton is staring at, and gets a better look himself. Upon the paper in front of the anxious side, is a perfect drawing of an injured transformed Patton, laying upon a bed, poultices in place. On his chest, a fairy Virgil sits, watching over him.

“My, that is magnificent! How long have you been drawing like this? Don’t tell me you could do this the whole time!” Roman says with a cocked eyebrow.

“No, Princey. I just did gloomy landscapes before. I threw them away after I would do them. It was just a way to relax, nothing more. But after I brought you guys back, I switched to drawing memories with you guys or a close facsimile of a memory I wasn’t completely part of or conscious for.” Virgil says with a shrug of his shoulders. “I don’t know why, but it does relax me, plus it comes in handy since I didn’t have a phone to take pictures. You made us leave them in your room in the mind palace.”

A thoughtful look crosses the creative sides face, and his eyes alight upon the portfolio on the table. “Are you comfortable sharing what you have drawn so far? I wouldn’t want to cause you any undue stress. I am curious, nothing more.”

The anxious side glances at the portfolio on the table, and a shot of panic pops up, but he quickly snuffs it out. These are mostly their memories too. He has nothing to fear from the others, who have gone through exactly what he is drawing in the first place. They have already voiced their opinions of the first drawing they have seen, and they like it. He sees nothing wrong with sharing the rest.

Virgil nods, and Roman moves the portfolio so he can open it. The others gather around him as he opens it and begins to look at the drawings stored inside. They all look at each drawing, one by one, and the anxious side stands to brew another cup of tea since the kettle is on the verge of boiling anyway.

“Nikola Tesla.” The logical side mutters, and Virgil turns from putting a tea bag into his and Patton’s “kittens” mug to see what caused Logan to blurt his version of a curse and sees the logical side holding one of his drawings in his hands, eyes wide with wonder. “I thought only Patton saw me,” Logan whispers, as Virgil steps over to Logan to see what picture he is looking at. A full color transformed Logan is looking at himself in the mirror, the fingers of one hand touching his cheek, his glowing indigo eyes somehow conveying sadness, as the other hand lays flat upon the mirror. “I was unaware of what my other hand was doing. I was only concentrating on the one on my face. I could not feel it.” The logical side whispers.

Patton glances at the picture in Logan’s hands and puts a hand on the logical sides shoulder, giving it a squeeze. “And after that night, you seemed to get better, which was wonderful!” Patton says with a smile. “You just needed a reminder that we are a famILY.”

“I was spying on you,” Virgil confesses. “But it was out of concern for your well being. Good thing Super Dad was on the same page as I was, and prodded you in the right direction.”

“I appreciate it. I do.” Logan says with a smile. The logical side takes a deep breath and moves to put the picture in the pile of those already viewed. “You can keep that one if you want,” Virgil says as he hands Patton his tea and sits back down at the table. “I can always draw it again.”

“Thank you, Virgil.” Logan says as he lays the picture off to the side, away from the “seen” pile.

They look at each drawing, one by one, remarking on the memories it brought forth. There was a portrait of each of them in the small cells at the beginning of the quest, and the resulting “after” portrait. A picture of fairy Roman preening in front of a mirror made each of them chuckle, and a picture of Karybdis tending the fire at one of the many campsites, a picture of Patton tending to Jasper, and Patton and Logan at the Roulette bush. The picture of Metty, resting her chin on her entwined fingers with a mischievous smile on her face made Roman chuckle. “That was when she gave me and Virgil the reversal agent. She didn’t even tell us that she did it until I had drunk it already.” The royal side explains when Patton and Logan seem confused.

When they got into the first batch of drawings that Virgil had done, they did so reverently. They quietly looked at the drawings the anxious side had done after their reformation. Logan sitting reading a book, Roman sitting on the floor, lost in thought, a pad of paper on the coffee table in front of him, Patton in the doorway to the kitchen. A picture of an unconscious Virgil being carried by Roman, with Logan next to the royal side. “I had to guess on that one.” The anxious side says. “Since, I was uh...out of it? I just knew I heard Princey and Teach at the time.”

The last picture in the portfolio was of Virgil sitting on the floor across from Roman’s door, back against the wall, head down in sorrow. “Oh, kiddo,” Patton whispers as he looks at Virgil across the table. “Don’t worry, Super Dad. That’s all in the past. Logan figured out a way, and you are all here now. Everything’s good. Uh….everything is good right, Roman? All of us being up isn’t messing with Thomas in any way, is it? I can’t tell.”

Roman closes his eyes and concentrates for a moment. “Nope, he’s fine. Dreaming pleasant dreams and all that. No harm, no foul.” The royal side opens his eyes and smiles as he carefully gathers the “seen” pile up and shifts it back into the portfolio and closes the cover. “These were all amazing. It was interesting to see the memories you had put down onto paper. If this calms you, keep doing it. I, for one, hear my bed calling me. I intend to take a few “mental health” days away from the Imagination. It can run itself fine for a bit. Thomas needs his creativity bright eyed and bushy tailed, and rest is what I need right now.”

“Agreed.” Logan states. “This has been rather cathartic. I think I shall also turn in, there are a few more hours until morning, and I believe I will be able to sleep now. Goodnight, everyone.” The logical side picks up the gifted drawing and heads upstairs to everyone's murmured “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, you two,” Roman says as he disappears upstairs, and a few moments later, his door is heard opening and closing, leaving Patton and Virgil alone.

“I’m still not tired.” Patton sighs. “I think I will watch a movie.” The moral side shuffles to the DVD movies next to the TV and begins to look through them. “I wanna watch Moana,” Patton says as he puts the movie on and turns on the TV, plopping down on the couch, grabbing the remote and arranging his blanket over his legs.

“Mind if I join you?” the anxious side says as he moves to the couch to sit down, and the moral side pats the seat next to him with a big grin. “Sure, kiddo!”

Virgil sits down next to Patton, and the moral side puts the blanket over the anxious sides legs, and snuggles next to him, selecting play on the remote to start the movie.

The two are found the next morning by Logan, deep asleep snuggled together. The logical side grabs the blue blanket that had fallen to the floor and covers the two sides sleeping on the couch and turns off the TV and DVD player. Yes, back to normal. Whatever that is. The logical side thinks with a small smile, as he walks into the kitchen to make the morning coffee.

The End.