Wire Witch Violet

Wire Witch Violet

@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

Money goes in here: https://patreon.com/wirewitchviolet Writing comes out here: https://wirewitchviolet.tumblr.com Here there's gaming livestreams on mondays, creative projects alternate Fridays, each starting at 8 PM: https://www.twitch.tv/wirewitchviolet

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Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

Hello. I had an account on that other site that got permanently banned like a week after the buyout and have just been offline since basically. I also decided to do a total rebrand of all my websites and ditch the name I used on that site because stalkers got real bad. Next post has familiar links:

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

Here's the first half of a quick spoiler-free retrospective on a ritual a friend and I have been at for over a decade where we end up watching VERY obscure but generally really interesting horror movies. I forgot how many movies I love I first watched doing these: www.tumblr.com/wirewitchvio...

tumblr.comPost by @wirewitchviolet💬 0  🔁 0  ❤️ 0 · 12 Years of October Horror Challenges · As you might have guessed from this recent post generally celebrating the genre, or most conversations I end up having with people on social…
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Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

I have to assume, oh, someone wasn't smart about it. Someone downloaded some mega art pack of several thousand high resolution textures and they left that entire library in the file system when they compiled the game instead of just the handful they actually ended up using. This is a sloppy mess.

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

Or they left some other random large files inside the "zip all this up and package it as a game directory" that just happened to be saved to the wrong directory at some point. In any case, THIS sloppy mess is finally done! New thread as I go live in a few moments, finally.

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Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

HOWEVER! That STILL shouldn't ever be getting you anywhere near 100 gigs! You need super high detail on the texture of an eye if you're shoving a camera in people's faces all the time, but you don't really need that level of detail on stuff you're never going to look at up close and like a 1x1 meter

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

lovingly high resolution image of like... a cement wall should be all you need for every single cement wall in your entire game. And when it comes down to it, you should be able to get away with like... a couple dozen unique really detailed textures if you're smart about it. So when I see 100 gigs,

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Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

are 2D art files at the end of the day we're just kinda stretching around these polygonal shapes), we can end up eating a lot of space if we have a LOT of images and/or we have STUPIDLY high resolution on those images. And when you make a 3D game OK maybe someone will zoom way the hell in on like,

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

a character's eye, so you need to have an image that looks pretty good at full screen 4k resolution of just the iris of this eye. And some fancy 3D rendering stuff involves making additional images at that same resolution as like... contour maps for how light reflects and absorbs and faking depth.

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Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

of the space being taken up. But again, you do not get anywhere near 100 gigs with the amount of audio files a game is ever going to have. Our last big space consumer is graphical data. If we're talking about 3D graphics, the actual shape of everything is basically free. You can be really dumb with

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

how many triangles you use to build the shame of a thing if you don't know what you're doing, but each of those corners is still just going to be what, a byte or two? Maybe eight if we're getting fancy? It's still a rounding error in 100 gigs. If we're doing 2D art though, or we want textures (which

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Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

novelty features like people bringing FMV games back or otherwise using real life footage for cutscenes now and then. But even then video compression has gotten pretty damn great, so even at a really luxurious overkill resolution, 100 gigs of video would be... thousands of hours? Nobody's doing that

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

(84%) Audio takes up less space per minute than video. It's more reasonable to expect a game to have dozens of hours of high quality audio though, especially if it's like an RPG or something with fully voiced NPCs, so for a game with reasonable space usage, audio files SHOULD BE a huge percentage

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Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

What still takes up some measurable space at this point is just going to be: Pre-rendered movie files... which kind of became a thing in the first place when we first got access to CDs, because holy crap what are we even going to do with like 200 times the space people had before making that jump,

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

and because there was a pretty huge gap between what you could render in real time vs. what you could stream off a disc after having used some dedicated 3D animation rig. But what hardware can handle in real time has eliminated the appeal for this, so it's mostly not a thing anymore, outside of some

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Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

if a game suddenly took up twice the space as similar games that came before it, heck yeah, we're in for something special here! But that is not a graph that extends out to infinity. For the most part, we broke completely through the ceiling of where space was a creative limitation on games with CDs

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

The actual space you need on a disc to hold all the text a game will ever need to display, and all data not being directly sent to the players senses- all the code, map data, stat blocks, etc. etc. has taken up effectively zero space for the past like 30 years. (Download's at 73% by the way still.)

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Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

and brimstone about the situation coming to pass. You're in active development, you're constantly pushing new shiny stuff, you have some maybe bloated enough to be measurable databases tracking things and redundant backups and bla bla bla. But something I just have locally on my drive so I can play

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

it? No, you have done a bad. There was a time, back at the dawn of the medium, where storage space for a game was a massive limiting factor on what you could even do, and a huge part of making games was cutting content and finding little optimization tricks to reuse assets (bushes=clouds stuff), so

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Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

have on the shelf here and I'm playing it start to finish. Maybe RE5 if I somehow have a co-op friend available, maybe these DreadOut games, The Beast Inside. Maybe some combination of the above. It'll be a surprise, or maybe make a request, we'll see. But yeah, for now, we are waiting on this to

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

download, and I gripe about ridiculously bloating file sizes on games and how I always dread them. So... there is NO REASON for ANY game to be 100 gigs. MAYBE if we're talking about what's stored on the server of an MMORPG? I wouldn't say that's GOOD, but I can see situations where I'd be less fire

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Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

These other half dozen games, I am going to contort my schedule around for the rest of this week and do quick little mini-streams to cover, one or two a night, until I'm caught up. Honestly, this will probably work out. I can't do that sort of schedule all the time, but imagine, streaming just one

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

or two games, at a time people are actually awake. Probably about midnight eastern let's say. And then because I was already planning to do this, I'll also squeeze in some kind of bonus Halloween stream some time next weekend. Not even sure what it'll be, but I'm taking at least one horror game I

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Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

and have that finish by the time I play through all the smaller stuff. Unfortunately, this weekend, my internet has decided to just REALLY suck. So here's where things presently stand, having started stuff downloading on Friday. So I think I need a plan B here. First, I am waiting however long for

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

this currently downloading bloated nightmare to actually finish with my internet cutting in and out at random, and then I'm going to stream these... 6 games. Looks like that's going to be in another 1-3 hours maybe, depending on the whims of this ISP I am so desperate to someday be rid of. I swear.

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Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

letter, and part of the reason a lot of these are the one straggler is because it is a frelling 100 GIG install. Or more in some cases. So getting these downloaded at all is kind of a long process, but also my "work space" for these streams is roughly 200 gigs or so. Usually, that's enough space to

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

download my dozen games for the week, even if there's a couple huge ones in the mix. When I have a week like this though, I have to grab a big one, a medium one, a handful of smalls, and hope I can juggle things around in the background where I can play and delete the big one, start another download

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

Or maybe it won't be up shortly! Let's try the age old tactic of complaining about the problem until it goes away! So the increasingly dubious looking plan A for tonight was to finally knock off some persistent crumbs in the first half of the alphabet where there's like 1 game left under a given

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

As I do sometimes, I wrote a thing! www.tumblr.com/wirewitchvio... Recommended if you: - Like horror and want a pat on the back. - Don't like horror but trust whoever gave you the link. - Haven't seen Jim Henson's The Cube - Want a bunch of fun recommendations. - Want a surprise White Savior lecture

tumblr.comPost by @wirewitchviolet · 2 videos💬 0  🔁 0  ❤️ 0 · Horror is the outside of the box. · It's October. This always happens in October. Someone with too big of a platform who does not generally watch horror movies makes an exception,…

Wire Witch Violet reposted

Bill Corbett
@billcorbett.bsky.social

Replying to @billcorbett.bsky.social

This applies to the anti-Islamic signaling too - some overt, some subtler. All bad. Poisonous. Yes, NOT ALL Democrats do this. But too many. It’s a road to failure! And it’s deeply immoral.

Wire Witch Violet reposted

Bill Corbett
@billcorbett.bsky.social

Anti-trans Democrats are spreading poison when we can least afford it, during elections in this ongoing fascist takeover. As a strategy, it’s a recipe for failure. As a moral stand, it’s reprehensible. PS I’m the father of young trans woman and I’ll never forgive anyone who makes her life harder.

Wire Witch Violet reposted

Casey S. Pumpkins 🎃
@caseyexplosion.bsky.social

Replying to @caseyexplosion.bsky.social

I wish I was exaggerating, 16 games from one dev, all AI slop, all clones of something else, all pumped out in the space of months. That's my experience of what AI tools are enabling, not creativity, not anyone's dream game, but spam. Constant, low effort, neverending, AI generated spam.

Wire Witch Violet reposted

Casey S. Pumpkins 🎃
@caseyexplosion.bsky.social

Replying to @caseyexplosion.bsky.social

On Monday, I had to go through and sort all the slop that was flooding my inbox, declining all the obviously AI garbage so I could see real games people were trying to send me. I thought I was finished when I suddenly had a further 16 games in my inbox, all AI generated, all from the same developer.

Wire Witch Violet reposted

Casey S. Pumpkins 🎃
@caseyexplosion.bsky.social

Replying to @caseyexplosion.bsky.social

AI proponents cling to the idea that the tech is going to enable boundless creativity, but I've seen what it enables; endless spam. It's enabled people without a single ounce of creativity in their bodies to make endless Balatro clones, genuinely no thoughts of their except Balatro but slop.

Wire Witch Violet
@wirewitchviolet.bsky.social

I'm am getting blindsided with so much trauma today I swear: Hey, let me remind you about that friend who hurt you real bad. Hey, let me remind you about that stalker you had to flee your home over. Here's the bigot who ran you out of that discord server posting more overt transphobia to it.