#and none of the tutorials i've seen make a bit of sense

[calltainn]

I've got it into my head that I want to make a kilt for myself for non-formal wear. They are warm but breathable, are easy to move in (length and weight dependent), look cool, have fun/confusing gender vibes, etc.

So I've been looking for a half-decent tutorial on how to make one and so far it's tough going. Not least because every tutorial starts with a load of guff about how important it is to choose a tartan that fits your heritage. Or even that you are only permitted to wear a particular tartan if that's the case.

Listen. "Clan tartans" are nonsense. Just choose one you like the look of. Tartan patterns as they are today do not have deep roots; they were made up as a marketing tactic in the 1800s.

[itsbenedict]

so i've been shirking a lot of my duties lately because Pikmin 4 is out and man Pikmin 4 is good. it's got it all- its core game loop is so meticulously polished and optimized to not waste your time, the new sort of minigame modes it introduces are all challenging and enjoyable, it looks fantastic...

...and i said in a post recently that nothing annoyed me about it, but that i might find something later. so here's a comprehensive list of things that annoy me about Pikmin 4, to demonstrate the level of nitpicking i have to go to to find flaws in this game.

As previously mentioned, the tutorial is a bit too long- it's ages before you get your hands on even a single pikmin. They really want to teach you how to use that dog (which, in fairness, the dog is super useful.)

The load times are kind of unforgivably bad for a first-party title in an actual cartridge. It's rough stuff, especially when there's several back-to-back during phase transitions.

The departure cutscene- though skippable, thankfully- I usually don't skip because the music is nice and it's cool to see a bird's-eye view of the area when you're done for the day. Except in this game, the camera stays in a bit too tight and all you ever get to see is the ground. Lame.

The story's kind of trite, I guess. Pikmin's never had a super strong narrative element and doesn't really need one, but these rescue squad losers are pretty one-dimensional and kinda ruin the sense of solitude and discovery. (Also it it-was-all-a-dream retcons all the previous Pikmin games' stories out of existence for some reason??? Like, no big loss, but weird decision considering there was absolutely no need to do that.)

oh yeah no one was gonna be fooled by that fakeout midgame ending, lol. don't waste my time with that crap

The character creator is pretty bad- it's kind of impossible to make anything that looks good with the limited palette of options, and the choice to use the same character creator to design all the castaway NPCs (and main cast!) was a decent idea in theory but in practice all the NPCs look randomly-generated and just awful. Zero points for character design there.

Endless menu notifications for things you've already seen. Like, yeah, I know there's a log entry for this new pikmin I just found, you just showed it to me, I don't need a flashing "New!" indicator until I go into the menu and re-read the thing I just read. And kind of weird that B is "go from the map to the log menu" and not "dismiss the map".

There's a special mode that unlocks after a certain point in the game which is just like an entire Pikmin 1 inside Pikmin 4, which is fun but if you want to back out of it and put it on hold it's not super clear how to do that while keeping your progress. (You have to just exit from the pause menu during gameplay.)

rot13 for spoilers: Gurl oebhtug gung fgrnzebyyre zbgureshpxre sebz Cvxzva 2 onpx!!! Shpx gung guvat!!! Ohg zber vzcbegnagyl, shpx Pbyyva jub jba'g fuhg hc nobhg ubj V fubhyq whfg eha njnl naq cebprrq guebhtu gur yriry jvgubhg trggvat nyy gur gernfher naq pbzr onpx bapr vg'f qrnq! V'z abg tbaan qb gung orpnhfr V'z abg n ONOL, Pbyyva! Lrf, V XABJ vg'f qnatrebhf! Shpxvat rirelguvat ba guvf cynarg vf qnatrebhf, Pbyyva! Guvf vf abg n arj qrirybczrag!

The progression design is a little out of whack, I think- rather than each new area having an onion and being designed around the pikmin from that onion, there's multiple redundant onions and you frequently get new types from candypop buds in dungeons, so you learn to use them while they're extremely limited and precious before getting the ability to make more of them later on. I'm not sure it works as a design choice- it just kind of means I don't use onionless pikmin unless I'm forced to.

Note that none of these are gripes with the primary gameplay loop. The primary gameplay loop is fine! Playing the game still feels perfect, polished to a mirror shine... with thus far only one exception. That exception being:

Okay so you've got your onion, right? You bring stuff to it and seeds come out and plant themselves around it. You go to the onion to take pikmin in and out, too. What's the button to do that? You stand under it and press A. What's the button to start auto-picking all the planted pikmin whether they've bloomed yet or not? You stand a millimeter to the left of that and press A. Hrm.

Now this wouldn't be a problem because there's a contextual button popup that says which thing will happen when you press A. So you only pluck when it says pluck, right?

NO, IT LIES

If you press A to go into the add/remove pikmin screen- sometimes that screen is unresponsive, and it won't say why, but it's because you're in the middle of plucking pikmin, actually. Your stupid dog was a millimeter to the left and decided that it was going to do its own, different thing when you pressed A, which was start auto-plucking.

They had to program that in!! They had to program in a behavior for the menu to not respond when your dog is in the middle of plucking pikmin!! So they knew this could happen! And instead of fixing it so that the game does what the button prompt says instead of a different thing that's invisible, they said "okay, tell them no, you have to back out and tell your dog to stop first."

"Also your dog won't listen to you until it's already auto-plucked at least one pikmin, so now your squad of flower guys is going to have one premature leafy straggler."

Like, come on! This happens constantly! There's no way it didn't come up in QA! Why in the world wouldn't you fix this? It's so obviously a problem and so easy to solve! Auuuuugh.

Anyway that is literally everything I can think of that's bad about Pikmin 4. The rest of it is tremendously satisfying and I like it a lot. 9/10 game for sure.

[arimarushunya]

I just finished pokemon violet, and while I have many many gripes with how it runs and certain mechanics, I'm with nearly everyone else I've seen talk about this game in that it's probably my fav.

What makes me really sad tho is that this game had so much more potential to be absolutely phenomenal, had it not been rushed like it was. Imagining what kind of game it could have been with more time and attention,,,, almost makes me hate it as is lmao

stream of consciousness and spoilers under cut

Area Zero man. None of the rest of the scenery really wowed me, but going thru Area Zero... my initial enjoyment of it was a bit dampened by not being able to use Miraidon to get around, but it was still just a cool area and I can't wait to explore it more thoroughly later.

I really liked the rpg-ness of having friends traveling with me. It made the game feel fuller and more impactful. Like a lot of the game until that point was traveling vast expanses of just pokemon, with very small chunks of story happening at ocassional checkpoints. Having people traveling with me who were moving the story along while I traveled made the game flow better and feel like my traveling was part of the story, if that makes sense. Wish it had been a mechanic during any other part of the game (tutorial aside).

Story wise, I guessed the big twist pretty early on, but I think it actually aided my enjoyment? like, the tension of probably knowing Turo's fate while traveling with Arven, who just wants to see his dad.... 😭😭😭

The first Turo fight was cool, I'm a sucker for AI goes rogue but good stories. Everything after that fight tho was kinda,, eh. I didn't find Miraidon's arc super compelling, and the ending felt weird. Idk how to explain, but AI Turo's decision felt more selfish than sacrificial, which didnt tonally mesh well with me. But, it's a kids game, it need a somewhat feel-good ending ig.

Now, my main gripes:

- Performance. This honestly goes without saying; this is everyone's biggest gripe with the game. It's extremely unpolished and runs like shit. I don't think I got over 20 frames at any point. Considering BOTW and Odyssey both came out YEARS before this, there really shouldn't have been this much of an issue making a large open world switch title. This is likely cause by how rushed the game was, and it's so sad to see.

- it's pretty empty. like I said above, there's vast expanses of land to travel thru, but once you've caught the pokemon in the area, it can be a drag to explore because there's nothing else really compelling. Having more story beats outside of towns, or having a traveling companion might have fixed this, but as is it feels like a slog to explore.

- Character customization. I'm getting fucking blue balled by Nintendo, having all these clothing shops in scarvi that they don't do shit bc you're forced to wear one of four outfits the entire game. Like, they were so close. I have to imagine this was due to time constraints, bc the other option is they did it out of spite to prevent boys wearing skirts.... I just was so turned off by the shops as a whole bc this sucked so much ass.

- various QOL: - would have loved repels to prevent small ass pokemon spawning underfoot while I'm trying to get somewhere. - shiny indicator, some of these pokemon are impossible to tell apart (<strike>tandemouse</strike>). - Being able to see the previews of picnic items before you buy them like every other shop item??? - FOR MY POKEMON TO MATCH MY WALKING SPEED IN LETS GO MODE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. YOU CANT PUT A POKEMON IN THE GAME THAT NEEDS WALKING TO EVOLVE AND THEN HAVE IT NEED TO GO BACK IN ITS POKEBALL EVERY 4 SECONDS.

I don't really have a closing note for this, it's just ramblings at 1am after having binged pokemon for the last week, but I do want to touch on the terastal/paradox pokemon designs. tbh I hateee how the terastal pokemon look. their hats are so so so so stupid looking. but, once I realized that you can change the tera typing, I'm not as mad about it. I get they can't do custom forms for every type for every pokemon, but God are the UGLYYYYY.

As for the paradox pokemon, they look cool, but I think with the premise of future pokemon, it would have been more interesting for them to be organic rather than robotic. I think there was supposed to be a theme of AI thru the game, bit they didn't really dive deep enough into that. It would have been much cooler for the pokemon to be like, crystallized somehow. bc of their relation to the tera crystals and all. idk, future = robots just feels uninspired. Buttttt, they look cool enough, and they paradoxed my fav pokemon, so I think I can let this slide. for now.

EDIT: after I hit post I remembered that Clavell said "cheugy" at me and it made me have to explain cheugy to my wife and I have never been so fucking blindsided by a video game

[gyeheoni]

I've been wanting to this but I've been too shy for too long hahahaha

I've been making verivery content for a while but I really want to improve my gif sets, and your gifs are mighty beautiful TT_TT may I ask for advice? Like do you use your laptop or your phone? Do you use photoshop??

oh feel free to ask me anything ! :D and yes of course ! gifmaking is actually fairly complex on tumblr ;-; so i'll try my best to include the basics and all the important stuff ! 

for gifmaking i use photoshop 2018 and so i use a laptop >.< i’ve seen a lot of asks where people ask about what apps gifmakers use... and to put it nicely ... there is no easy way to get nice gifs T-T the reason gifmakers on tumblr have such nice gifs, is bc there’s a lot of patience, learning, and practice involved in creating gifs for this platform... you can’t just plug in a video clip to a gif converter and expect it to spit out an hd gif for you ... unfortunately ... 

before beginning i’ll recommend this tutorial ! it’s the tutorial i used when i was first learning... and my best advice is to have lots of patience ;;;; tumblr is a hard platform to make gifs for and learning how to make nice gifs will not happen overnight 

Photoshop and other resources 

i personally downloaded ps 2018 and that works fine for me but i’ve noticed that ps cs5 or earlier tends to have a broken ‘import frames to layers’ action so i’d suggest newer versions for gifmaking ! to download i basically looked up youtube videos and checked comments to make sure the tutorials actually worked,,, but if you want you can try these posts ! (1, 2) i’m not sure if they work but usually there’s a lot of posts made on tumblr + other sites for downloading it for free ! 

About video processing programs

i also use avisynth to process my frames... this might be a really complex bit to learn and it’s not 100% necessary so i’d say you can skip over it when you’re first learning photoshop and everything but if you are interested ! basically programs like avisynth and vapoursynth reduce the video file size down to tumblr’s preferred image size without reducing the quality as much as resizing in photoshop does :o ! additionally it helps process torrents (these are the ts and tp files for live performance stages that are super hd !) but again it’s somewhat complicated i’d recommend this tutorial for download and use if you ever want to ! (vapoursynth additionally has sharpening and denoising options, but since i’ve never used vs it’d be easier to look up a vs tutorial than to ask me >.<) 

Where to get videos 

this part is CRITICAL !! for gifmaking,,, you could be the best gifmaker on this whole site but if you have a video with poor quality... no matter what,,, your gifs will not come out nicely T-T so when downloading any vlives or youtube videos, they should be at least 1080p in quality ! or as high quality as possible ! this is bc you need to reduce the file size down by a lot for tumblr’s dimensions and this means you need the best quality :o ! i typically just screenrecord videos these days bc downloading whole hour long vlives / long youtube videos is a strain on my laptop hhh ;;; for live perfo stages you should always download torrents to use but this means you need video processing programs like i said above >.< there’s a resource here to help find them ! 

these are the basic tools you’ll need hhhh there’s a lot more including sizing, sharpening, coloring, frame rate delay, exporting, saving, etc... and i don’t want to make this too long but ! 

essentially tumblr has size dimension restrictions for image files, a pixel too big or too small will cause tumblr to stretch or compress your gifs making them blurry... the dimensions are optimally:  a.) 540pixels (width) for one gif in a row b.) 268pixels (width) for two gifs in a row c.) 177pixels / 178pixels / 177pixels for three gifs in a row 

for sharpening many people use topaz etc. and i’ll point you to other tutorials if you want to use it but tbh ! i use photoshop’s smart sharpen options and those work just fine for me... (plus topaz takes forever to render and i h8 its guts so) 

coloring - okay so this is probably THE MOST time consuming part for gifs for me.... idk if you’ve noticed but lots of times, gifmakers’ gifs have pretty colors and nice lighting when you compare to the original video ! that’s bc we add layer adjustments in photoshop to make them look nice ! these include brightness, saturation, exposure, vibrancy, etc. but knowing how to use adjustments is a whole post on its own >.< there’s lots of coloring tutorials out there as well if you want me to direct you to them ! 

for frame rate delay, i use 0.05 seconds for 30fps (so your normal videos) and 0.03 for 60fps (if none of that made sense that’s okie ! it’s just basically how fast you set frames to play in your gif !)

when exporting - tumblr has a 10mb gif limit but honestly anything above 8mb starts making me anxious or takes too long to load .... so most my gifs are like ... 3-7mb only 

but yea these are just some basic tips and stuff ?? i’m sorry it took me so long to respond and it wasn’t as nicely organized as it could be... there are a lot of really good gif tutorials out there ! you just have to look a little ! if you have any additional questions tho feel free to let me know ! i just didn’t have the heart to type out the literal process i have to go through everyday when making just one gif :p i’m sure a lot of gifmakers can relate haha,,,, happy gifmaking !~