#lynxden

[isayoldbean]

Hello hello! I have an assumption about Huge Beef: she likes to arm wrestle >;3

you would be correct!

[onwesterlywinds]

hi Livvy! I'm here from the ffxivwrite post you made! First off, congratulations for finishing it this year! 30 prompts is no joke haha. I'd like to send you something I'm extremely proud of! Prior to this xivwrite, I hadn't written for myself in 4 years. I got 23 prompts done before the deadline, and ambitions of finishing the prompts out to turn the series into a physical book, courtesy of a friend.

archiveofourown.org/works/58873828 This one is Day 10: Stable! I'm also really proud of Day 3: Tempest, which sets up the relationship between Solveig, colonialism and the Doman refugees we meet in Stormblood, and Vira as an infant. (Never mentioned but implied: Solveig is part of the lion dance association, which is her way of keeping the refugees' traditions alive as atonement for her past as a Garlean conscript.)

Oh my gosh, this is so sweet!!! I absolutely feel the love in it, in everything from Solveig's practice of her craft to the growth of the kid she takes under her wing. 😭✨

Thank you so much for sending this through - and congrats to you as well for writing for yourself again! I really hope the book idea goes through!!!

[toadmancer]

THANKS FOR GENDER FEELGOOD

HAPPY GENDER BEEEEAAAAAM

[pointyhatspointyears]

A peaceful day at father Haru's bonsai nursery, for @lynxden For the wonderful stories you tell, the music you share & the love you spread <3 Thanks for letting me play with the family I love them so much ;^;

[reconditerune]

if your WoL had a Custom Class, what would it be?

One of my lovely mutuals posted a prompt in SEAFLOOR: if your WoL had a Custom Class, what would it be? - Aaaaand since I don't have a Bluesky it seemed like a good excuse to post the character sheets @archaiclumina and I have been working on bit by bit since June!

There is a bit of info on the sheets (most of it written elsewhere of course) but if you don't want to click to open for the basic rundown they are: Cal - Elementalist

Oli - Chemist

Ren - Mystic

Leon - Orator Thanks for the prompt, @lynxden!

[ubejamjar]

Then vs. Now - 2023 vs. 2024

Tagged by @lilbittymonster, thank you my friend ❤

Tagging (with much affection): @elliewiltarwyn @primamchorus @angelinecarax @aislingsurrow @viiioca @lynxden @oneiroy @amalthea-felsblood

Here's a screenshot I took on the very first day I loaded up the game and one I took just now!

Stressed, depressed, but still smilin'! Changes below the cut ❤

Hair- changed to darker blue because I liked it more; I add/remove the lavender highlights depending on the hairstyle. Stopped choosing hair that obscured her facial scales because I'm confident in drawing them now :D

Eyes-went from gold to pale-almost-white yellow courtesy of light corruption!

Presentation- started to lean into her being more masc than fem, though I still switch between both.

Body- C+ to make her more mid-sized. Still constantly making little adjustments, but I'm very happy with where she is right now.

It has been very fun changing her around both vanilla and crime brulée to reflect how time passes or she changes.

[ornerykarakul]

Thank you to @lilbittymonster and @lynxden for the racial scaling help! Biblically accurate Sebli lives!

[nhaneh]

@lynxden Okay, so, one of the big challenges with digital graphics is memory - if you want to be able to display a consistent image, you inevitably have to store some kind of representation of what you want displayed in memory somewhere, and as the quality and detail of what you want to display grows, so does the amount of memory required to represent it.

Take a fairly common screen resolution like, say, 1920x1080 pixels - how much memory does it take to represent that? Well, we have roughly about 2 million pixels... and since we likely want full RGB colour, we're likely using four bytes per pixel - one byte for each colour channel of red, green, and blue, and then one extra byte for padding since computers prefer to work with even byte counts... and that gives us roughly 8 megabytes. Now say we're running a game that has a framerate of 60 fps, and suddenly we need to rewrite that screen memory 60 times per second, meaning we need to be able to write roughly 480 megabytes per second to screen memory just to keep the display updated.

This was... not something that computers used to be able to do.

Now, sure, we can reduce the number of bytes we use per pixel, but that comes at a severe limit to how many colours we can represent: if we use only a single byte per pixel, then that gives us only 8 bits total. Say we divide those up like maybe 3/3/2, then that gives us only 8 shades of red and green, and only 4 shades of blue - sure we can mix them however we like, but it's not really going to be able to represent smooth colour gradients.

So what if we take another approach - we still just use a single byte per pixel, but instead of using that to represent an RGB colour... we use it with a look-up table containing 256 different RGB colour values - this means we still have access to the full RGB colour spectrum, albeit with the limitation that we can only display 256 different colours at the same time.

This is an 8-bit indexed palette - each pixel takes up a single byte, which is then used to reference an index in an array of 256 RGB colours. This is how colours were represented both in .gif images, as well as in old VGA graphics mode 13h (320x200 pixels, 256 colours) on DOS era PCs. The SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis used the same technique, though it was limited to only 64 simultaneous colours.

There are advantages to this beyond just needing less memory (and less CPU cycles copying said memory) - since each pixel value represents a palette index rather than a distinct colour, there's a type of animation you can do called Colour Cycling or Palette Animation where instead of changing the pixels themselves, you change the colour values in the palette array - meaning you can change what colour a particular index represents across the entire screen without having to actually modify a single pixel value.

To take an example from wikimedia:

There are other tricks you can do with this too - ever thought about how the Sonic the Hedgehog games for the Mega Drive/Genesis did water stages? The game basically keeps track of which horizontal scanline the console is currently sending the video output and when it reaches the point where the waterline is, it quickly swaps out the palette from the regular to the underwater one, making everything in the lower half of the screen have a different colour from the top half.

Nowadays this kind of approach to representing colour is largely considered obsolete, but it was a common approach for quite some time, since it could give you quite a range of colours without too much of a performance or memory cost - so long as you only ever needed so many at once. Of course, it also means your ability to do colour blending or light and shading can get pretty limited since you can't just mix pixel RGB values together, but there's still quite a bit you can do with it.

Of course, since I'm doing it on a modern PC running in 32-bit full colour, my implementation is basically a 256-index array of uint32_t containing RGB values and I just do a final pass of translating from the 8-bit framebuffer to the 32-bit framebuffer by using the 8-bit values as array indices before doing the final blit from the 32-bit framebuffer to the actual screen.

I used to poke around with this kind of graphics on the actual VGA mode 13h at some point however long ago, so for me it's a pretty nostalgic approach to doing graphics.

[alliezweihander]

Allie sparring with @lynxden 's Burakh!!!

[angelinecarax]

A lover!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (could you tell?)

Angeline honest to god thinks most Active, Genuine fighting a self-serving excuse of a waste of time, on the whole. Any given fighting art can be beautiful, meaningful, absolutely, don't get her wrong.

She just can't bring herself to agree with the focus and precedence the world seems to have with violence and she's tired of pretending she agrees with most people's justifications for it.

However... the longer she spends under the mantle of the Warrior of Light, the more she realizes the kinds of power she stands in the center of regardless of whether she asked to or not, and the more her decisions grow heavier and more weighty than those around her, the more she would pick "I commit a single terrible act of extreme violence, but it Wakes You Up and makes the rest of the violence stop? Fine! Here You Go!" more and more handily. She's always loved dancing, and especially working with a lance and with chakrams, its just the joy of moving your body but more vigorous. High Impact Dancing. It's Fun!!

Something for her to watch out for. Though mistakes made in carelessness, in love or in war, teach lessons that are hard to forget.

@lynxden QUESTION TWO THANKA YOU!!!

📧tag game postbox --> Secret OC Ask List

[halikyon]

Tagged by @chickwhatdigsgiantrobots

Last Song: Dream Eater by Ghost Data and Ymir. Its what came up last in my exceedingly long list of randomized music. I find it to be a cool combination of styles.

Last Movie: Probably All Quiet on the Western Front? I just don't watch movies ever. Lots of documentaries like Secret Base and Down the Rabbit Hole style.

Currently Reading: My own writing, mostly. Lots of going through again and again from draft to draft. One day I'll even have something to show people.

Currently Watching: Uh....? I really don't watch TV or streaming services. Had some old Defunctland on in the background yesterday I guess.

Tagging: @diamondangelkitten @lynxden @primamchorus

(don't feel obligated to I assume folks are busy)

[verysmallcyborg]

tagged by @lynxden!! thank you <3 (it won't let me properly tag for some reason hmm)

Last song: TRIALS by starset

Favorite color: purple

Last movie/TV show: dungeon meshi

Sweet/spicy/savory?: SPICY ALL THE WAY (at what cost)

Relationship status: 🤔

Last thing I googled: the stardew valley official wiki

Current obsession: xiv is the obvious answer, but specifically getting the battleforged title (300 onsal wins), but i guess the non-xiv obsession would be getting back into stardew? i must experience all the new things from previous updates..........

(i know this was a "nine people i'd like to know better" tag meme but i'm so bad at tagging people if i don't do the memes right away whoops bhjdfshbgw)

[sword-and-lance]

((Shoutout to @lynxden for inadvertently giving me a Gender Revelation

Or maybe not so inadvertent lmao :P))

[nhaneh]

@lynxden assuming you meant cpu and not gpu then yes xD

it's basically some of the most memorable and fun moments I've had learning programming has been about doing things the Hard Way™ - doing things manually tends to require you to spend more time thinking about what the computer's actually doing to accomplish the things you ask it to do, which is inevitably a lot more work and often nowhere near as efficient or capable because it's pretty unlikely that you just happen to be smarter than the entire R&D teams they have at Nvidia or Unreal or wherever - but it does force you to learn stuff, at least on a temporary basis.

I mean look, when I first learned how to do proper programming that wasn't just faffing around in Qbasic or whatever, it was on Turbo Pascal in DOS some 25-odd years ago, and I'm kind of forever grateful that when it came to doing graphics, instead of just having us use the built in Borland Graphics API, the teacher taught us how to enter VGA mode 0x13 via direct DOS interrupts, and then how to draw graphics by writing directly to the part of memory that held the screen for that mode.

I still remember the address being 0xA000.

So when I decided I really should take another stab at trying to figure out how the hells matrices work for 2D and 3D transformations a few weeks back, I thought hey why not try doing all of this directly using the Win32 GDI API, BitBlt:ing a framebuffer into the graphics because then I'll also have to re-learn a bunch of stuff that I've more or less forgotten over the years. Plus, there's a part of me that kind of wants to try to take some time to learn at least a little more about software reverse engineering - see if I could ever get to a point where I might be able to look into whether some examples of old games or software that doesn't work so well anymore could be updated to work a bit better.

So, step by step I'm gradually working my way towards a software triangle rasteriser to see about poking around with all of that and I dunno maybe I'll make something small and simple out of it like maybe some vampire survivors-alike or something like the original after burner or maybe even descent or something, who knows.

For now it's mostly a whole lot of googling around, trying to wrap my brain around stuff that feels like I used to find it easier to understand than I do now, and basically just reminding myself why I liked doing some of this stuff, haha.

[alliezweihander]

2021 vs 2024! we've come a long, long way ❤️

thanks for the indirect tag, @iron-sparrow! :p

tagging @lynxden if they haven't done it yet :3

[angelinecarax]

while Angeline found many people difficult to like at first and then came to cherish them -- Alphinaud, Thancred, Ardbert to name a few -- nobody got more on her nerves more permanently than Zenos. Every single second of her attention Zenos wrung out of her, she resents. In the strongest possible terms:

So leave me alone. Away with you! Everyone told me that I was wrong I have nothing to do with it! They gave me a lot of advice I don't want to have anything to do with you! THANK YOU....

for Angeline, that would be more than enough. She has a bigger enemy than some bozo with a one track mind who can't take a hint.

Angeline does not like her Azem. Angeline has very very very many negative feeling about her Azem. Every sense she gets, not good.

(content warning for cartoon front tail (literal description?) in music video)

Instant music Fills the world The kids are hooked on it Diet music Go crazy for it And fuck right off!

Also, many excruciating artistic differences.

So it turns out she dooooooes, none greater than her ancient, "her Self's self" and what she feels entitled to. However.

Find your life, don't hide from what you are And rise before you fall And hope for something more, Live if you really want to Live if you really want to Live if you really want to

Hippolyta was not always a vindictive, spiteful woman. She's incapable of seeing Angeline as a separate being from her, but she knows when she's beaten, and when someone else comes out on top.

📧tag game postbox --> Secret OC Ask List

🎐🎐@viiioca and @lynxden and @archaiclumina thank all of you sooo so so much for this quastion. I love.... music a great deal. I feel lucky to get to share it! 🎐🎐