Hello World August Bos
We welcomed Bos baby #4 yesterday. Had a home birth on a beautiful, sunny holiday Monday.
Mom and baby are doing great! (I am a little sleepy, thanks for asking)
@ObbeVermeij Vehicle model loading always was the top crash on Windows when we made SA-MP. 20ish models was fine, 35ish after manual RwObject management, which we eventually pushed to ~50 with more memory relocations and VehicleStruct hackery. Huge FPS penalty at that point anyway :)
For gta3, Vice and SA; Memory on the ps2 was tight. We had to limit the number of used vehicle models to 8.
My code would occasionally pick a car model to be phased out. Once there were none left on the map, this model would be removed and a new model could be loaded.
The code would pick a model that was appropriate for the area (sports cars in business district, old cars in run-down areas etc).
Most of the time this worked fine.
A few things could throw a spanner in the works:
If the player had gone up the wanted levels, some of the 8 slots would be taken up by police cars, FIB and swat vans and the police heli.
Level designers would sometimes load specific car models for missions. Often these were not appropriate to be used for ambient traffic.
Ambulance and firetrucks could be needed if there was an accident.
If the player travelled to a different area of the map; some of the loaded cars would look out of place and could not be used. It would take a while for replacement models to be loaded.
The game would keep the last player driven car, as it would be jarring if the player went back and it wasn’t there.
At times there would only be 1 or 2 cars models available for ambient traffic. This lack of variation was particularly noticeable if the player was driving the one car that had to be used.
To alleviate the problem, garages remove cars inside of them once the door has closed. This way the model could be removed. When the player opened the door, the cars were re-created in the same spot.
Npc models were loaded/removed the same way. It just wasn’t as noticeable if variety was lacking.
For each game we picked a generic looking character model that looked appropriate in each area of the map. This model was never removed and always ready to fill in.
Screenshot from this vid: youtube.com/watch?v=KWhjv4…
Big personal news: after 25 years at CNET, I’ve joined @CFS_energy, a startup developing zero-carbon power plants to fight climate change. As head of content, I'll work to make knowledge of fusion mainstream as it proves itself worthy. Details: linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…
Whoops, I'm doing a reorg of the anchor positioning spec, and "anchor" has stopped looking like a word. My brain's insisting it's a nonsense word pronounced "ann-chore" now.
@ElliottZ@b1tr0t ...websites serve dynamic manifests or resources (e.g. bad CDNs), or aren't world-reachable (e.g. intranet), meaning we can't globally attest authenticity. (2/2)
@ElliottZ@b1tr0t It's conceptually similar to Android App Bundles: rather than every APK containing resources for every screen resolution, we only package the ones a particular device needs to reduce the transfer size even more. Secondly a non-trivial number of... (1/2)
Unfortunately it looks like webapks don't migrate when getting a new android phone. So half my apps are gone. :/ Shouldn't that be a P1 bug? It means every time a user gets a new device you'd lose engagement with them (and be deleted from their home screen).
@ElliottZ@jaffathecake Yup. I don't disagree, however, it's one of those cases where we dug a technical hole eight years ago that we need to crawl out of. That takes time, & we've too long let perfect stand in the way of good.
@beverloo@jaffathecake That means it won't preserve the app groups on your home screen though? Getting a user to place you on the home screen costs conversion $$$. Having webapks deleted from the home screens on a new device means paying that conversion cost repeatedly.
@jaffathecake@ElliottZ We're planning to start rolling out a solution for this around June, building on Chrome Sync. Won't feel as seamless as Android just yet, but addresses the functional gap.
@Mustafa_x@alexey_rodionov@PeterEConn Yeah, on the sixth day. Can you believe it? Just a day after he created Windows and Linux, and two days after he invented the Internet. That was before lunch, of course, because he got annoyed with all the wires on his desk so dreamt up WiFi during his afternoon nap.
We're considering dropping the manifest requirement for Mobile Web Installability as well, if the user experiences proves to be good enough, which would allow users to install any website they like! 🙂
@alexey_rodionov We already infer name and icon for add to homescreen shortcuts. Description and screenshot wouldn't apply—we only use those in Rich Install UI, which would continue to be reserved for optimised, high quality experiences.
@JonasKuske@slightlylate@jungkees We've explored a lot of different options with the Android team, most, while promising on the surface, end up making the heuristics completely ineffective. New metrics are coming late this year that may suggest a path forward, but otherwise this isn't a priority I'm afraid.
@slightlylate@beverloo@jungkees If Chrome could use the Job Scheduler without the risking of having *all* its jobs/notifications deprioritized due to interaction heuristics (e.g. by grouping jobs by notification channel, each with different heuristics) this could be implemented without web changes right?
I don't know how to explain it but... I swear my body & mind can't accept that I get to go to Europe... it's hallucinating for me... and I end up being utterly unprepared cause I can't think too much about it 😅