#with the data available to vanilla

[lyinginbedmon]

If you don't frequent my coding streams I feel like you maybe won't appreciate the last 3 hours of my life. So here's a hopefully-comprehensible explanation:

Started a new project, adding a manager AI to Minecraft villages so they can grow and expand as needed without player intervention. Call the project Hrrmowners because it's a perfect name with no issues.

Step one, naturally, is to make the infrastructure for actually understanding the layout of a village, so I make a quick system that tells me all the bounding boxes of the structures used to build villages during world generation.

Then realise that I'm actually highlighting every single structure in the game. So I need to filter things down a bit.

It takes me about an hour to find any shred of information in the disparate and convoluted world generation infrastructure of the game to have even the first clue what spawned building is part of a village. Not anything else, just if its intended to be part of one. This still catches pillager outposts, and ancient cities for some godforsaken reason.

Figure that there must be a gameplay element or two that specifically are handled by villager objects. Maybe it doesn't have all the information I need, but it might have something useful for this early stage of development.

Iron Golems spawn in villages, but it's actually the villager AI that does it, and it doesn't care about an actual village.

Cats only spawn in villages (and witch huts), and they have a spawner object in the world data. Could this be the clue I need? No, because it doesn't actually reference any kind of village data object, it just checks for occupied beds nearby via the points of interest storage of the world.

"Points of interest" are a system of noteworthy positions in the world added in 1.14, aka the Village & Pillage update, and basically let villagers reserve a bed to sleep in and a workstation to treat as its job. Every point of interest is a tile entity that gets loaded in a separate list when the chunk is restored from memory, so the world never needs to know anything about its own terrain to know where those points actually are. It just adds them in whenever the chunk spawns.

Notably removed in 1.14 is the villages.dat file in every world save. It contained the locations of every building in the village. That was fed into a Village object in world memory to monitor stuff like iron golems spawning.

It doesn't exist anymore. "Villages" as a concept, only actually exist in the world generation step, and then nothing knows or defines what they are.

TLDR: As of Minecraft 1.14, in the Village & Pillage update, the mobs named villagers actually have absolutely no clue what a village actually is.

[simbouquet]

TS3: Better Greet

This mod requires Lazy Duchess’ Mono Patcher Library to work properly!

Here’s a brand new script mod for you! I got sick of seeing all Sims greet each other with handshakes, so I made this mod to fix and expand upon one of EA’s most annoying oversights in my opinion.

Better Greet overhauls the visual aspect of the Greet social interaction and allows Sims to play diverse greeting animations under different circumstances. See more details on all its features under the cut! 👋

Overview

In the vanilla game, greetings are limited almost exclusively to handshakes, with the only exceptions being the cultural greetings from World Adventures and the Proper greetings from Supernatural, as well as a rare ‘wave’ greeting that takes place when one of the involved Sims is carrying a baby or an object.

This behavior seems to be an oversight by the developers, as the Social Data for the Greet interaction includes some rules that in theory would allow Sims to use different animations when greeting friends, romantic partners and so on, but the actual script that handles greetings completely disregards these rules.

This mod aims to solve that and expand upon the possibilities by making Sims’ greetings also take into account things like personality traits, social group and relationship status.

Features

There are a host of new conditions under which Sims can perform the new greeting styles. Some aspects of these conditions can be edited in the mod’s Tuning resource, such as the relationship level or social group level required for a greeting to be performed. By default, the mod is tuned in a way that strangers, acquaintances, friends and romantic partners all greet each other differently.

Though there are no hard requirements, many of the greeting styles rely on expansion packs for their animations or to fulfill certain requirements, such as: World Adventures, Showtime, University Life, Island Paradise, Into The Future. The mod can still be used without any of these packs, the corresponding greeting types will simply not be available.

If UL is installed, Socially Awkward Sims have a chance of performing some greetings awkwardly. The reaction to these greetings depends on the target Sim's traits; friendlier Sims won't mind and will turn an awkward greeting into a successful one.

There are three optional alternate modes available that modify the greeting rules, which can be enabled in the Tuning XML file:

Require Greet Before Socializing: If this feature is enabled, Sims outside the current household will need to be greeted before they can be socialized with, similar to TS2's behavior.

Euro Mode: Adjusts the rules of the Double Cheek Kiss greeting in order to mimic the customs of parts of the world where giving a kiss on each cheek is a common greeting. This can be mixed and matched with the Check Gender tuning, which can restrict this greeting to be performed only with female Sims if enabled.

Historical Mode: Makes Proper Bow and Curtsey the default greetings (SN required) and disables some greetings that might not fit in a historical gameplay setting, such as High Five or Shaka Bra. Players who use the LN Celebrity system to simulate social ranks can take advantage of the Celeb Check tuning, which makes Sims greet with Proper Bow or Curtsey with Sims of a higher celebrity level, and Handshake with Sims of a lower celebrity level.

Acquaintance Greetings

Wave: By default, Sims will introduce themselves with a Wave instead of a Handshake. If their LTR is -20 or below, they will always use this greeting, with special animations if LN is installed.

Handshake: Sims will greet with a Handshake if at least one of the Sims is an adult, or if one of the Sims is a Workaholic. If WA is installed, two Workaholic Sims will greet with a Fast Handshake.

Double Cheek Kiss: If WA is installed and Euro Mode is enabled, Friendly Sims can greet with a Double Cheek Kiss as long as the target is not a Loner.

Friendly Greetings

Friendly Hug: Sims will greet with a Friendly Hug if their LTR is at least 40. If one of the Sims is a Loner, their LTR must be at least 60.

Shaka Bra: If IP is installed, Sims who share the Loves to Swim trait and have a LTR of at least 15 will perform this greeting.

What's Up: If SHT is installed and the actor has the Social Butterfly trait, they will perform this greeting with other Sims if their LTR is at least 10. Uses the Trait Bonding animation. If SHT is not installed, the required trait is Schmoozer.

Double Cheek Kiss: If WA is installed, Sims who share either the Snob or Diva (SHT) traits will perform this greeting if their LTR is at least 25. If Euro Mode is enabled, the trait requirement is skipped.

High Five: If UL and ITF are installed, Sims who share a Social Group can greet with a High Five as long as their influence level is at least 1, and they have a LTR value of at least 20.

Old Friend Hug: If ITF is installed, Old Friends can perform this greeting. Uses the Hug Long Lost Descendant animation. 

Romantic Greetings

Amorous Hug: Romantically involved Sims will perform this greeting if their LTR value is at least 60.

Shy Kiss: Romantically involved Sims will perform this greeting if they have had their first kiss before and the actor is Shy and their LTR is at least 70.

Amorous Kiss: Romantically involved Sims will perform this greeting if they have had their first kiss before and their LTR is at least 80. Shy Sims can perform this greeting if their LTR is at least 90.

Dip Kiss: If ITF is installed, Romantically Involved Sims will perform this greeting if the actor isn't Shy, is a Hopeless Romantic, has had their first kiss before and their LTR is at least 90.

Gestures

In addition to the improved Greet rules, I’ve added a new Gesture… pie menu category full of custom interactions equivalent to most of the new greeting styles, giving you options to greet Sims however you prefer. This feature can be toggled on or off by editing the Tuning XML file.

By default, many gestures have the same LTR requirements as they do in Greet, but most of them have no trait requirements (exceptions being Bow, Proper Bow and Curtsey.) Some gestures also have a chance of failing if the initiator has the Socially Awkward trait. These can all be modified in the Tuning XML file, so you can disable the Socially Awkward outcomes for gestures or get rid of all LTR/trait restrictions altogether.

To avoid redundancy, some gestures are essentially clones of the socials they share animations with and are only available when the target Sim hasn’t been greeted yet, such as Friendly Hug and all the romantic greetings. High Five and Shaka Bra have been hidden from the Friendly category and made available in the Gesture category instead.

Strings & Language Support

The new Gesture pie menu interactions are translated in the following languages:

English

Chinese — zh-TW (by Little Duck Liu – 26/02/2025)

Czech (by ProtectusCZ – 22/01/2024)

Dutch (by Cassowary.Casserole – 26/02/2025)

French (by Nostural – 10/07/2024)

German (by McNero – 25/01/2024)

Italian (by Giuls.ds – 10/07/2024)

Polish (by FernPolska – 10/07/2024)

Portuguese — pt-BR (by Aeri – 20/11/2024)

Russian (by @hydro1st – 24/01/2024)

Spanish — es-ES and es-MX (by me, with adjustments by @patrycarro – 25/01/2025)

Swedish (by kaellstroem – 25/01/2025)

In addition to the brand new strings for gestures, I’ve replaced the strings of some tangentially related interactions:

In the Spanish versions of the game, the Invite Over phone interaction was incorrectly translated to “Invitar a casa” (Invite Home), despite actually inviting the Sim to whichever lot the active Sim is currently in, not just their home lot. Corrected to “Invitar a solar actual” (Invite to Current Lot.) Other languages this mod is translated in may include their own correction of the string if necessary. All other languages will continue to use the original interaction name.

It’s possible the same mistake occurs in other localizations of the game, so as always, I appreciate any submissions of STBLs in other languages!

The Ask to Leave interaction is renamed to Goodbye across all supported languages. A little less crass sounding if you want to send a visiting friend home. 🙂

Ask Everyone to Leave is renamed to Goodbye to Everyone. Since I couldn’t find the exact string in the game files like I could with “Goodbye”, I've only made this change in English and Spanish (es-ES & es-MX). Other languages this mod is translated in may or may not include their own adjustment for this string. All other languages will continue to use the original interaction name.

Tuning

To edit the mod’s tuning, open the .package file with s3pe and edit the Tuning XML resource in a text editor of your choice.

There are lots of different tunables as I've tried to make the mod as customizable as possible, but adding them all in here would make the post even longer than it already is 😅. I've tried to organize them as neatly as I could in the XML so hopefully you'll be able to make changes easily!

Compatibility

Conflicts with any other mod that replaces the social_greet jazz script in JazzData.

Download: SFS / MTS / Patreon

28/01/2025: Fixed Sims resetting when inviting or being invited by another Sim to a lot.

25/01/2025: Added Mono Patcher dependency. - Implemented optional Require Greet Before Socializing feature. - Fixed Old Friend Hug not running properly. - Removed SocializingActionAvailability XML override from the package. - Fixed "Be Greeted" interaction text not being localized in non-English games.

20/11/2024: The Gesture... social category can now be toggled on or off via the Tuning XML file.

09/11/2024: Fixed Gesture... social category showing up erroneously in certain situations.

25/01/2024: Adjusted greetings for Historical Mode; lower celebrity level Sims greet with Bow or Curtsey, higher celebrity level Sims greet with Handshake.

24/01/2024: Check Gender now only checks gender within the Greet social; Gestures can be performed freely regardless of gender. - Hidden Gesture... social category when a Sim is asleep. 21/01/2024: Updated with the following features: - Implemented Gestures, allowing Sims to perform any greeting animation at any time. - Implemented Historical Mode; replaces Wave with Bow or Curtsey and disables "modern" greetings such as High Five or Shaka Bra. - Added string replacements and corrections.

19/10/2023: Fixed custom tuning not working properly.

26/06/2023: Fixed Child Sims stretching; adjusted rules for Friendly Hug greetings between Child Sims and older Sims.

19/06/2023: Initial release.

Credits & Thanks

Battery’s Script Mod Template Creator: Getting started with scripting quickly.

nraas: I studied their code and used parts of it to work out how to replace the Action Data of a social interaction, as well as inject the tuning of one interaction into another.

dnSpy: Peeking into the game’s files.

Visual Studio 2022: Writing the script.

s3pe: Exporting/Importing resources, creating the package file.

Adobe Photoshop: Creating and editing the preview image.

Thanks to @lazyduchess for helping me with scripting!

Thanks to @misspats3 and @probablyzora for testing and giving feedback!

Thanks to the lovely community at TS3 Creators Cave!

Hey bb girl mwah!

[gatheredfates]

Greetings everyone! If you're thinking to yourself 'Wow, it's been a bit since Sea updated the Compendium', you'd be right! I've been (unfortunately) dealing with that demon we call burnout. However, I am determined not to let it win, even if it's capping my own creativity/drive at the moment, which is why I bring you an update to the Compendium. ✨

If you know of any communities I have missed, please reach out to me via my Discord or the Google Form.

However, as of 09/29, the following communities have been added to Sea's Community Compendium for XIV Creatives.

EVENT / COMMUNITY SPACES

The Cursed Carbuncle—The Cursed Carbuncle is a Cabinet of Curiosities & Oddities which sells alchemical reagents, curios, cursed items, intriguing artefacts, luxury objects, occult, rare books, taxidermy & unusual finds.

LORE

How Rare is that Job?—An Unofficial, Opinionated Look At Class/Job Rarity For FFXIV Roleplayers, created by Mis’to Raesthe on the Odin Server.

MISC

Leyla's Gposing Guide—This website is an ongoing comprehensive gpose guide that helps you every step of the way from the vanilla gpose menu to using shaders and posing tools/plugins, complete with screenshots and video guides, as well as pose/edit-along videos. It's also meant to allow many people to submit their own guides and tips.

So You Wanna Start Roleplaying in FFXIV—(Specifically, on Crystal Data Center). But It Sounds Really Scary And You're New And How Does This Even Work Anyway? A FAQ by By Nevivi Nevi/Lenneth Andrew of Balmung.

Have you thought about joining our Tumblr Community? You can find it here!

Want to submit? You can either fill out the google form here or send me an ask with the relevant information!

Is my space suitable for the Compendium? Most of the time, yes! Below the read more is some more information/stipulations. This is all publicly available on the document.

Below are the following things I do not accept on the Compendium:

Personal/Single-Character LFC ads. (Though these get posted to the SEAFLOOR Tumblr Community when I find them!)

Content intended for or can be used for bullying, harassment and OOC gossip. E.g. ‘Secrets’ blogs, receipts, callout posts, etc. This does not include IC tabloid blogs or other ventures used to generate roleplay.

Communities that do not have an RP/writing element (large-scale exempt).

Anything I find personally distasteful or goes against the spirit of this project.

Common-sense rule applies.

I want to put my community on the Compendium but we have an application process. Is this okay?

Yes! Just note somewhere in your application that's a requirement. The only thing that is mandatory for the Compendium is that you must be open to new members or have a public-facing/accessible facet. There's no point advertising a community if no one can join it in some way!

I want to put my Community on the compendium but I only have x number of members —

Also totally okay! People don't start with large communities. Activity is a must but, whether your server has two or two thousand members, if you're looking for new people to join, I'd love to help you find people.

I want to put my community/resource on the Compendium but I worry its too niche?

Okay, and? If your Eorzean Fishing Alliance has four members but you roleplay every second weekend, I still want to know about it. The same goes for resources; if it's relevant to the game, it'll be useful to someone.

How active does a community need to be?

If you find a community has not been active in about two/three months, send me a message and I'll take a look at it. Communities have ebbs and flows, especially event spaces that may take hiatuses depending on member interest/life events. I'm not strict in my implementation provided a space isn't dead. If a link or anything is broken, contact me asap!

I have [insert a question not stated here]?

No drama! Send me an ask or use the #Compendium channel in my Discord!

[cornbread-but-minecraft]

New Y'all It's Fall update now available for both Bedrock and Java Edition! It fixes Potted Azaleas and underwater fog (on Bedrock Edition), and also tweaks the colors of Savannas and some other biomes.

Links:

Bedrock Edition (PMC)

Java Edition (PMC)

Java Edition (Modrinth)

Changelog:

Bug Fixes

[BE] Azalea Leaves and Flowering Azalea Leaves now look the same when covered as when they do when Fancy Leaves is disabled. (Vanilla inconsistency)  ৹ Does not apply to Java Edition because Leaves do not become opaque when covered there.

Pack now affects Potted Azaleas and Potted Flowering Azaleas. (Pack oversight)

[BE] Relatedly, the particles for Azaleas and Flowering Azaleas are now the correct color. (Pack oversight)  ৹ Does not apply to Java Edition because it uses a different texture for these particles and did not need to be fixed.

Potted Flowering Azaleas no longer have flowers on their insides, to match normal Flowering Azaleas. (Vanilla inconsistency)

[BE] Water in normal Swamps and Swamp Hills is now 90% opaque instead of 65% opaque.  ৹ Swamp water is intended to be 100% opaque, but Mojang broke it in game version 1.21.40. Instead of fully restoring the opacity, I decided to change it to 90% because it looks better.  ৹ Does not apply to Java Edition because the opacity of Water is hardcoded there and cannot change based on biome.

General Changes

[JE] Pack now reads as compatible with game versions from 1.21.0 to 1.21.3.  ৹ Does not apply to Bedrock Edition because version compatibility is an opt-out system there, rather than an opt-in one.

[JE] Pack now reads as compatible with game versions all the way back to snapshot 23w31a, which is the first to support multi-version packs.

[BE] Panorama is no longer the one from the Trails and Tails Update. (Removed panorama textures since the Tricky Trials panorama has no visible plant life aside from some Mossy Cobblestone)

[JE] Panorama now only shows the Trails and Tails variant in game versions from snapshot 23w31a to release 1.20.6. Otherwise, the vanilla panorama is shown.  ৹ Does not apply to Bedrock Edition because resource packs do not have version overlays there.

Tweaked the grass and foliage colors in the Savanna again (including carried Acacia Leaves texture). They should now be a warm golden brown rather than a dull reddish one. (This also affects Deserts and Nether biomes)

Tweaked the grass and foliage colors on Stony Peaks. They should now be more noticeably paler and colder than in the Forest, but not to the extent that they are on Windswept Hills.

Tweaked the grass and foliage colors on Plains. They should now be slightly lighter and yellower. (This also affects normal Beaches and Dripstone Caves)

[BE] Water in Jungles and their variants is no longer bright neon green. It is especially less green in the Sparse Jungle. Still a little green, though.  ৹ Does not apply to Java Edition because Water color is defined via data pack and inaccessible via resource pack there.

[BE] Water in normal Swamps, Swamp Hills, and normal Rivers is now slightly less blue.

Pack now affects Mossy Cobblestone and Mossy Stone Bricks! They are now slightly less green.  ৹ The Mossy Cobblestone on the panorama has been intentionally left out.

[BE] Pack now affects Water in the Tall Birch Hills, Modified Jungle Edge, and Shattered Savanna Plateau since I missed those biomes before.  ৹ These biomes are unused by world generation, and as such, are very hard to test. If you spot any issues with them, please let me know.

[BE] Pack now (finally) affects underwater fog in all biomes in which the surface water color is also affected.  ৹ This is done by adding new fogs and not by replacing the existing fogs for command reasons, but I am not sure how this affects resource pack compatibility.

[BE] Subpack Changes Do not apply to Java Edition due to the lack of Subpacks.

Removed Winter subpack! It has been moved to its own standalone resource pack called "Y'all, It's Winter!"  ৹ As such, all winter related resources have also been removed, except for the sound events, which remain for command reasons.

Renamed "Autumn" subpack to "Whole World".

Added "Forest Only" subpack.

Technical Changes

[BE] All affected block textures have been moved to "textures/cb_custom_blocks/autumn" for potential resource pack interaction, except for the textures for Mossy Cobblestone and Mossy Stone Bricks, since the terrain_texture.json entries for their walls have not been flattened.  ৹ This is done using terrain_texture.json and not blocks.json for potential interaction with Slightly Better Foliage Colors.  ৹ Yes, I know it's been a long time since I officially dropped Slightly Better Foliage Colors interaction. I will get it working again eventually.

[JE] All affected block textures (except those for Mossy Cobblestone and Mossy Stone Bricks) have been moved to "textures/block/cb_autumn" for potential resource pack interaction.  ৹ This is done using the model files without touching the blockstates files for potential interaction with Slightly Better Foliage Colors.  ৹ Yes, I know it's been a long time since I officially dropped Slightly Better Foliage Colors interaction. I will get it working again eventually.

[BE] Lowered resolutions of colormaps birch.png, swamp_foliage.png, mangrove_swamp_foliage.png, and swamp_grass.png to 1x, 1x, 1x, and 2x respectively. Hopefully this doesn't cause issues.  ৹ Does not apply to Java Edition because none of these colors are defined by colormaps there.

[nhaneh]

okay so if anyone wants to be part of the whole Old Kea Steps On Your OC thing, there's some simple things I'll be needing from you!

For one, you need to tell me you're interested (obviously) xD

Two, I need character appearance data in some form! If you use a lot of Crimes™ then a Mare MCDF file is obviously the easiest, if you use Crime Tools but your character is mostly vanilla then .chara files will work just fine! If you don't use Crime Tools, saved character creator presets also work (though you'll have to tell me what apparel to use since those only save character appearance) - you can find said presets stored under /Documents/My Games/FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn/FFXIV_CHARA_??.dat, where ?? is preset number. They also contain their description in plaintext towards the end if you open them up in notepad or whatever

If none of these options are available (or comfortable) to you for whatever reason, such as you play on console or the like, you can always tell me directly what character appearance picks you use - what colours, slider positions, radial buttons etc, plus outfit obviously.

Alternatively, it is technically also possible to meet up in-game so I can make a character save directly - this approach might be a bit convoluted as I play in the EU region and most people in the tumblr XIV circles I'm part of seems to play on US datacentres, but I think cross-region transfer to Oceania might still be available? Anyway, that option also exists, just so you know.

Some brief character notes to give me something of an idea of how to characterise them might also help xD

That's about it!

[st-kitten]

“cinnamon girl"

MIGUEL O'HARA x READER warnings: none that disastrous, mention of piercings, biting and blood (harmless, but hot) words: 2,598

Miguel is busy working, trying to focus on tasks at hand when you walk in the office space and suddenly, all he can think about is why you smell so good. He can’t get your fragrance out of his mind, which drives him to give in to his infatuation…

As Miguel sat diligently at his desk in the bustling headquarters of the Spider Society, he immersed himself in his work. Surrounded by the hum of activity and the glow of computer screens, he focused intently on the tasks at hand. With his attention fixed on the reports and footage in front of him, Miguel was determined to meet his self-imposed deadlines and excel in stabilising the multiverse.

Behind him, Jess and Gwen discussed their latest mission. As radiant as ever, Jess flaunted her expertise on Gwen, who absorbed every last detail with admiring eyes gawking at her. Somewhere in the corner, Pavitr and Hobie lurked in the shadows, contemplating yet another political firecracker Hobie had ignited between the two. Peter sat on one of the couches, exhausted from having to run after Mayday, who had been confined to her seat surrounded by a labyrinth of webs. The hubbub was lively, and somewhat productive.

Miguel hoped for a break in the stagnancy. He reminded Lyla to send alerts to everyone, instructing them to work, but to no avail. It seemed that everyone had taken one long break. Well, everyone except Miguel, who had not rested for two whole nights, his eyes half-lidded and brow tensed.

But amidst the controlled chaos of the office, something unexpected disrupted his concentration. A delicate fragrance, sweet and intoxicating, began to waft through the air, catching the attention of his spidey senses like a gentle whisper. The scent was so enchanting, so captivating, that it transported his thoughts to a place far removed from the monotony of his workplace. The aroma of cinnamon, coconut, and vanilla trickled through his nose and smudged his mind into a fog of nothing.

Intrigued by the allure of the aroma, Miguel glanced around, trying to discern its origin. He followed the scent with his senses, his focus shifting away from the computer screen and onto the ethereal fragrance. It seemed to be emanating from the far end of the office, teasing him with its enigmatic presence.

You walked in, eyes fixed on your iPad, tapping away furiously, as if racing towards the finish line. You could barely see what or who was in front of you and bumped into Gwen, pushing her into Jess, which Gwen obviously didn't mind.

"Honey, watch where you're going, yeah? One of these days, you're going to leap of some edge..." Jess muttered affectionately.

Redirecting yourself, you began walking in the other direction, almost missing the corner of the coffee table, which Peter managed to cover and soften with a blob of web.

Miguel watched you from his vantage point, wading through the numerous obstacles, including Pavitr and Hobie who had managed to hold themselves in some unsolicitedly intricate Yoga pose. As if under a spell, his mind wandered, captivated by the intoxicating scent that seemed to possess a magnetic pull over him. His eyes glazed over you, no longer registering the rows of desks or the symphony of typing keyboards. Instead, his imagination conjured images. Images he never would've visualised were it not for the fact that after all these months of you working for him, he hadn't notice how beautiful you were. Was it your perfume? Or did it just take him this long to fully notice you.

Miguel had spent countless hours working side by side with you. You shared the same office space, exchanged occasional pleasantries, and collaborated on projects. You'd helped him analyse data and organise it. He had never seen you. He simply took you for another helper. You, a human, hired for your impeccable work ethic and skills, were simply a resource to him. But all that changed when he saw you in your element. Did you always smell this great?

It was as if a veil had been lifted, revealing a captivating sight he had somehow overlooked. Your silky, flowing hair cascaded gracefully through a ponytail, framing a face that radiated warmth and intelligence. Your eyes, deep and expressive, looked so sensual whenever they focused on something. The way you would bite your lip when you came across information you didn't understand, the way you'd tuck strands of hair behind your face, but they'd never stay there, the was your neck arched to look up at the screens, revealing your collarbones and the pearls that rested on them, the way your loose buttoned up tops would slightly give away the view inside, the way your your trousers hugged your curves perfectly, the arch of your feet when you took off your shoes to sit comfortably on the couch now made Miguel mesmerised and entranced. He marvelled at how he had been blind to this captivating presence for so long, consumed by the mundane routines of their shared workspace.

As Miguel watched you interact with colleagues, he noticed the genuine kindness that infused your conversations. You effortlessly put others at ease with your compassionate words and infectious laughter. The more he observed, the deeper he fell under your spell, unable to tear his eyes away from your captivating aura.

Yet, even as his heart soared, doubt crept in. Miguel wondered if his sudden infatuation was a fleeting illusion, a trick played by his own desires. Maybe he was just exhausted and needed to sleep.

Shaking his head, he forced himself to look away from you and went back to work. Surely the multiverse was more important than his momentary crush on you.

As the day wore on, Miguel's infatuation with you continued to grow, his thoughts consumed by your presence. Feeling the need for a brief respite, he decided to take a quick water break, hoping to clear his mind and regain focus. He made his way to the lobby, where a small coffee cart stood, offering a momentary escape from the office routine.

As Miguel approached the cart, his attention was diverted by a figure standing nearby. It was you, engaged in a conversation with another colleague. Something about your demeanour caught his eye, a certain grace that commanded attention.

"Ay, dios mío, por favor..." he mumbled to himself, palming his creased forehead.

You looked back, glad to see Miguel out of his seat. You were hoping he would take breaks more often. The man worked for 24 hours. If a day was made up of 38, he would work for 38 hours.

"It's nice to see you out here... in the plebeian world..." you said jokingly, not meaning to practically throw it at his face.

Miguel didn't know whether to reply or to claw away at the walls and escape. Even your voice was a delight to hear. It was like you aroused all five of his senses. Slowly, he made his way to you, hoping to chug the whole water canister and not speak for God forbid what comes out of his mouth if he's left to his own devices.

The colleague who was with you took one look at a fatigued Miguel, said God's name, and chose to march in the opposite direction.

"What would you like? Coffee? Tea? Whatever that green thing is at the back?" you asked.

Your perfume. That's what I'd like, he thought to himself.

"Uh... Coffee."

"Milk and sugar?" you asked sweetly.

"Just throw it in," he said. He couldn't take it anymore. The alluring scent of your perfume, it enveloped Miguel's senses, and he couldn't help but inhale deeply, the fragrance permeating every fibre of his being. It was a fragrance so intoxicating, so enticing, that it seemed to possess a magical quality.

He gave in to that tiny part of him and stepped closer, standing behind you, watching you press the buttons on the coffeemaker. AS gently as he could, he lowered his head and breathed in. The combination of cinnamon, coconut, and vanilla in her perfume was an intoxicating symphony that danced around Miguel's senses, leaving him spellbound and yearning for more.

The warmth of cinnamon caressed his olfactory receptors, infusing him with a sense of comfort and familiarity. The spicy notes seemed to ignite a spark within him, igniting a fire of passion and igniting a newfound energy that fuelled his infatuation.

Coconut, with its tropical essence, added a touch of exoticism to the fragrance. As the scent mingled with the air, it invoked a sense of freedom, inviting him to embrace the spontaneity of life and the possibility of new beginnings.

And then there was vanilla, the sweetest and most alluring note of all. Its creamy and comforting aroma wrapped Miguel in a tender embrace, evoking a sense of intimacy and tenderness. It awakened his senses to the depth of his emotions, stirring a yearning for connection and a longing to explore the depths of his infatuation.

How could a stupid perfume make him act like that?

He regained composure and stepped back slightly. He watched you watch the machine pour coffee in a small cup. His eyes fell on your pierced ears. He got a feeling that you liked pain, in an adventurous way. Four piercings were after all a lot.

"Here," you said, handing him his cup. In his hands, the size of it shrunk dramatically.

Miguel took it, his fingers brushing past yours, which didn't help his plan of resistance at all. With each sip he took of that ridiculously sweet beverage, his need to consume you grew. He clutched the cup tightly, hoping his mind would find something else to focus on. He almost wished an anomaly would come and wreck the room. Lost in thoughts, he held the cup so tightly that it broke into pieces, splashing the coffee around and lo-and-behold, on your top.

"Fuck... I-" before he could apologise, you interjected and began dabbing tissues on your chest.

"That's okay. It happens. With you people. I guess. I think. I concur. I'll just... Go to the washroom," you said.

"Yes. This way," Miguel replied, leading you to the nearest washroom. He had no idea why he was going with her. She knew where it was. Why was he with her?

She opened the door to the washroom, walking over to the basin, leaning over it, and splashed some water on her top.

Unbeknownst to him, Miguel had followed her in and now stood behind her, trying his hardest to pull his gaze away from her chest, which was glistening with water droplets.

"You good?" you asked, looking at his reflection in the mirror.

He couldn't resist the temptation any longer. He reached out and took your wrist in his hand, holding it gently but firmly. He lifted it to his nose and took a deep breath, savouring the scent of her perfume. It was intoxicating, and he felt himself getting lost in it.

"What is this?" he asked.

"What?"

"Your perfume. It's fucking ridiculous. Why does it smell so good?"

You let out a soft chuckle. "It's just a body splash... Why-" you couldn't finish your sentence because of what Miguel started to do.

As he held your wrist, he realised how smooth your skin felt against his fingers. He couldn't resist the urge to touch her more. Slowly, he let go of your wrist and placed his hand on her neck, feeling the softness of your skin. He leaned in, inhaling her scent, and felt a rush of desire wash over him. He was going insane over how good you smelled, how smooth your skin felt against his. Feeling your skin rise with goosebumps satisfied the animal in him. Like a bloodhound, he buried his nose in the crook of your neck, inhaling as much as he could, his hand still tenderly caressing your arm, running his fingertips up and down.

He knew he shouldn't be doing this, but he couldn't help himself. She was like a drug to him, and he was addicted. He felt his self-control slipping away, and he knew that he was in danger of losing everything he had worked so hard to achieve. He tried to pull away, to regain his focus, but it was too late. He had already crossed a line, and he couldn't go back.

"Dios mío, hueles tan bien..." he whispered in your ear, feeling you shudder.

He smiled, and continued whispering sweet nothings in your ear. "Eres tan hermosa. No sabes lo que me estás haciendo, verdad?" He closed his eyes and let his body react to you. He snaked his arm around your waist, pulling you closer and trapping you between the basin and his body.

"I have no idea what you're saying but..." you paused to take a deep breath.

"Mmm? Qué pasó, mi chica canela?" his voice reverberated in your ear like a rattling bass and that silenced you from thinking.

You shook your head, and mumbled, "Nothing... don't stop."

"I don't plan to." He leaned in, his lips brushing against yours. You, completely drunk on how Miguel made you feel, responded eagerly, your arms wrapping around his neck as he held you closer.

He couldn't get enough of you, the taste of your lips, the feel of your body against his. As your lips met, a rush of electricity shot through his body. He pulled you closer, leaving next to no space between you, his hands sliding down your back as he deepened the kiss. He untucked your top from your trousers and slowly unbuttoned your shirt.

"Don't throw it on the floor... It's expensive," you muttered in between kisses.

"I'll buy you ten more."

Feeling you smile into the kiss, Miguel growled, his grip on your waist tightening. He was indebted to that coffee stain for he would never have been in this situation were it not for that. As you pulled away for a bare moment, Miguel stared into your eyes, his heart racing. He knew that he was in too deep, that he had gone too far. But he couldn't bring himself to care. All that mattered was you, your scent, your touch, your kiss. He knew that he was putting everything he had worked for at risk, but he couldn't help himself.

"Mierda, quiero morderte, nena..."

"Hmm?" you asked, tilting your head oh so conveniently.

Miguel inhaled sharply and looked up at the ceiling. Did you really just do that? he thought.

He cocked his head and looked down at your innocent face. He wasn't a person who'd ever ask for anyone's permission, but seeing you be so vulnerably beautiful made him do it anyway...

"Can I bite you?"

He half expected you to run away. So, when your eyes glinted with and approving excitement, he was surprised, to say the least. He wasted no time holding your face in his palm and tilting your head, exposing your neck already pampered with his kisses. His dug his fangs into the soft flesh, feeling ecstatic, as if he was transported to another dimension.

All of his senses were heightened. Your perfume, the feel of your skin, you soft gasps, the taste of your blood, and the sight of your figure reacting to him in the mirror, sent Miguel to heaven. You were simply divine.

Miguel O'Hara had never wished for a more opportune break from his work and he was sure to take some more henceforth.

[wildstar25]

terribly sorry to bother, but I've been loving your screenshots since I stumbled on your blog, and like 100% genuinely: how do you get them to look like that? Is it all done in game or is it some combo of mods & shaders? Cause every time I see a cool pose I'm just left wondering how you did it. Obviously I wouldn't ask you to make a massive tutorial just for me, but if there are any resources or general things you'd be willing to share, I'd be eternally grateful!

Hi there! Thank you for enjoying my gposes, and you're not a bother; my ask box is open to get asks after all haha

To answer your question: My gposes are not a product of the vanilla game alone. I'm slapping my explanations under a read more since it's a bit long:

Firstly, I am running reshade, an open source post-processing injector. It's a program that can (in the simplest terms) run various visual filters over a video game in real time. Most everyone I know made the jump from Gshade to reshade last year, so if you look up "reshade for ffxiv" you should be able to find a handful of tutorials. When it comes to finding presets, there are a lot of independent shader devs for ffxiv and generally a quick google search should bring you to a few. Most of the presets I use are outdated holdovers from the GShade days, and I don't know if they are available anymore; so unfortunately I can't recommend any directly, sorry!

In general, I lean towards shaders that enhance the overall brightness and vibrancy of the (imo muddy looking) default graphics. Arsay can quickly get over exposed by the in game 3 point lighting, so putting a shader that boosts the brightness overall really helps preventing that. I set up my lights in gpose at 2, put the character lighting to 100, pick a shader with a LUT that gives me the colours and brightness I want and thats usually enough. sometimes I'll hit the manual brightness in game and mess with that too. I often go into the preset of the shader and muck about with the Depth of field settings depending on what I want. An important note regarding the use of reshade: While reshade does not directly effect in game files or gameplay and it's technically not against TOS (as far as I have read), it is still highly encouraged that screenshots taken with shaders on do not have the ffxiv screenshot watermark visible. Reshade has it's own screenshot button that you can map to any key of your liking that will capture the game and the applied shaders without any watermarks. If you have an nvidia graphics card, I believe you should also have access to the geforce post-process correction tools, and could use that as well to enhance the game visuals. However, I am under the impression it's solely corrective settings (brightness/contrast, vibrancy, saturation, etc.) and you do not have the ability to adjust the depth of field setting, apply LUTs, mess with ambient occlusion, etc. Aka the more in depth rendering stuff that would make your graphic card fan go brrr. I've personally never tried the nvidia filter system so maybe that's incorrect information. Best to do independent research on that!

As well, on the occasion I will bring some screenshots into photoshop and do further, fine tuned, tonal corrections there. Generally this is only when I'm trying to achieve a look that I can't get in game and I try to keep it to a minimum. When I'm working on big photosets or comics, I'll end up doing more corrections just to make sure colours/tones/shading are consistent through out.

On to the second part of the question: the posing. I do all my posing with this tool. It is a tos crime, however it's client-side only and completely undetectable to other players. It gives you full access to character rigs and allows you to not only build your own poses, but export and import poses, outfits, props used by npcs or seen in cut scenes, and character data as well. Tons of people will upload pose files on the various mod archives for others to use, so even people who don't want to mess around with rigs can have fun with their characters. I personally love posing, and it's something I'm very comfortable doing since I have a background in 3D modelling and animation. I do believe in working smarter and not harder though, so what I tend to do is apply an in game animation cycle to my character in question that has a frame or key pose close enough to what I need, pause the animation, turn on posing, and start rotating bones. I never really looked up any tutorials myself tbh, I kinda just messed around with things and figured the tool out as I went along. That said, there are tutorials on youtube if you search for them. "Anamnesis ffxiv guide" or something along those lines should bring up good results.

Anam also gives you further camera control than what is available in game, allowing you to fine tune its position to the .001 degree. You can increase the FOV and zoom range past the typical amount. Bring your character and camera pretty much anywhere on the map too. And you can export your camera setting to use between gpose settings! It's a really great tool, though it has some quirks and can in specific instances crash your game (never change a character while fishing lol)

That's pretty much it! I know this wasn't really much of a guide, so sorry about that. Most of my gposes are a product of seeing a fuzzy image/concept in my head and messing around with various compositions, locations, lighting conditions, ect. until I bring that idea into clarity. It's hard to explain that process in ways beyond "fucking around and finding out (positive)" I suppose to anyone else reading this has specific references in mind, please pass them along to sailor-artemis ! I know being told "just google it lol" isn't super helpful but I really just tend to figure things out on my own ^^;

[insecateur]

Hey Mr. Sam! I'm not super acquainted with the fanfic community, so I'd like to ask a question in order to put some thoughts in order. I've seen this recent phenomenon where some readers will try feeding abandoned/hiatus'd fics into some sort of chaptgptesque thingum in order to finish them, and writers are, naturally, upset. My question then is: are they/you *largely* upset because a) said readers are basically saying the writing is boilerplate and predictable enough that it can be ML'd into a coherent continuation; b) there is a legitimate fear of how the data is used or the program is trained on it; c) there is fear that their unique style will be successfully "replicated" by AI; or d) some other reason? Thanks for the info!

heyyy sorry for not answering right away,

i want to give a caveat before i say anything else - i'm markedly more jaded than most fic writers i've seen on this topic, as a primarily visual artist who's used to my work being reposted, reused, sometimes even edited etc without permission. i haven't even bothered to edit my fics on AO3 to make them available to registered users only bc i'm just like, it is how it is. if machine learning algorithms want to put my ott kinky smut in their research data you know what, good for them i guess. maybe it'll make the results less biased toward vanilla straight people lol

but anyway, i think in general it's a mix of not wanting your data to be put into machine learning without your permission or knowledge, and just an overall frustration at how people who read fanfic, look at fanart etc online treat people who make that stuff like they're basically non-existant or just there to provide "content" to be "consumed." which i guess is part of why i'm already way past jaded about it; people have already been doing this to fanartists for years and years and years at this point LOL. i'm actually myself kind of frustrated seeing some writers talk about it as if it's a new phenomenon and proof that writers are treated less well than visual artists in fandom ? when ummm. i guess you just didn't notice until now bc it wasn't threatening you? which is fine but it gets kinda old after a while.

i personally just don't like people doing stuff with what i make without permission, as much as it is a losing battle at this point. so seeing people joyfully basically say like, "i don't care about the people making the things i like, i can just get this ''AI' to do it faster anyway!" is pretty disheartening, especially when it involves feeding works you might have spent months or years on into it. it's kind of an accumulation of negative feelings.

in the grand scheme of things i'm mostly over it tho. to me it's pointless to worry about it just like it's pointless to worry about the people disregarding my wishes regarding my art. all it does is cause me undue anxiety. which isn't to say measures shouldn't be taken against it, and i'm glad there have been moves recently to try and draft laws etc on the subject, but at my level there's not much i can do except say "please don't do that" so really it's whatever.

[lunarsilkscreen]

JavaScript Frameworks

Step 1) Polyfill

Most JS frameworks started from a need to create polyfills. A Polyfill is a js script that add features to JavaScript that you expect to be standard across all web browsers. Before the modern era; browsers lacked standardization for many different features between HTML/JS/and CSS (and still do a bit if you're on the bleeding edge of the W3 standards)

Polyfill was how you ensured certain functions were available AND worked the same between browsers.

JQuery is an early Polyfill tool with a lot of extra features added that makes JS quicker and easier to type, and is still in use in most every website to date. This is the core standard of frameworks these days, but many are unhappy with it due to performance reasons AND because plain JS has incorporated many features that were once unique to JQuery.

JQuery still edges out, because of the very small amount of typing used to write a JQuery app vs plain JS; which saves on time and bandwidth for small-scale applications.

Many other frameworks even use JQuery as a base library.

Step 2) Encapsulated DOM

Storing data on an element Node starts becoming an issue when you're dealing with multiple elements simultaneously, and need to store data as close as possible to the DOMNode you just grabbed from your HTML, and probably don't want to have to search for it again.

Encapsulation allows you to store your data in an object right next to your element so they're not so far apart.

HTML added the "data-attributes" feature, but that's more of "loading off the hard drive instead of the Memory" situation, where it's convenient, but slow if you need to do it multiple times.

Encapsulation also allows for promise style coding, and functional coding. I forgot the exact terminology used,but it's where your scripting is designed around calling many different functions back-to-back instead of manipulating variables and doing loops manually.

Step 3) Optimization

Many frameworks do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to caching frequently used DOM calls, among other data tools, DOM traversal, and provides standardization for commonly used programming patterns so that you don't have to learn a new one Everytime you join a new project. (you will still have to learn a new one if you join a new project.)

These optimizations are to reduce reflowing/redrawing the page, and to reduce the plain JS calls that are performance reductive. A lot of these optimatizations done, however, I would suspect should just be built into the core JS engine.

(Yes I know it's vanilla JS, I don't know why plain is synonymous with Vanilla, but it feels weird to use vanilla instead of plain.)

Step 4) Custom Element and component development

This was a tool to put XML tags or custom HTML tags on Page that used specific rules to create controls that weren't inherent to the HTML standard. It also helped linked multiple input and other data components together so that the data is centrally located and easy to send from page to page or page to server.

Step 5) Back-end development

This actually started with frameworks like PHP, ASP, JSP, and eventually resulted in Node.JS. these were ways to dynamically generate a webpage on the server in order to host it to the user. (I have not seen a truly dynamic webpage to this day, however, and I suspect a lot of the optimization work is actually being lost simply by programmers being over reliant on frameworks doing the work for them. I have made this mistake. That's how I know.)

The backend then becomes disjointed from front-end development because of the multitude of different languages, hence Node.JS. which creates a way to do server-side scripting in the same JavaScript that front-end developers were more familiar with.

React.JS and Angular 2.0 are more of back end frameworks used to generate dynamic web-page without relying on the User environment to perform secure transactions.

Step 6) use "Framework" as a catch-all while meaning none of these;

Polyfill isn't really needed as much anymore unless your target demographic is an impoverished nation using hack-ware and windows 95 PCs. (And even then, they could possible install Linux which can use modern lightweight browsers...)

Encapsulation is still needed, as well as libraries that perform commonly used calculations and tasks, I would argue that libraries aren't going anywhere. I would also argue that some frameworks are just bloat ware.

One Framework I was researching ( I won't name names here) was simply a remapping of commands from a Canvas Context to an encapsulated element, and nothing more. There was literally more comments than code. And by more comments, I mean several pages of documentation per 3 lines of code.

Custom Components go hand in hand with encapsulation, but I suspect that there's a bit more than is necessary with these pieces of frameworks, especially on the front end. Tho... If it saves a lot of repetition, who am I to complain?

Back-end development is where things get hairy, everything communicates through HTTP and on the front end the AJAX interface. On the back end? There's two ways data is given, either through a non-html returning web call, *or* through functions that do a lot of heavy lifting for you already.

Which obfuscates how the data is used.

But I haven't really found a bad use of either method. But again; I suspect many things about performance impacts that I can't prove. Specifically because the tools in use are already widely accepted and used.

But since I'm a lightweight reductionist when it comes to coding. (Except when I'm not because use-cases exist) I can't help but think most every framework work, both front-end and Back-end suffers from a lot of bloat.

And that bloat makes it hard to select which framework would be the match for the project you're working on. And because of that; you could find yourself at the tail end of a development cycle realizing; You're going to have to maintain this as is, in the exact wrong solution that does not fit the scope of the project in anyway.

Well. That's what junior developers are for anyway...

[craigbrownphd]

If you did not already know

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) Machine reading comprehension aims to teach machines to understand a text like a human and is a new challenging direction in Artificial Intelligence. This article summarizes recent advances in MRC, mainly focusing on two aspects (i.e., corpus and techniques). The specific characteristics of various MRC corpus are listed and compared. The main ideas of some typical MRC techniques are also described. … Transformer-XL Transformer networks have a potential of learning longer-term dependency, but are limited by a fixed-length context in the setting of language modeling. As a solution, we propose a novel neural architecture, \textit{Transformer-XL}, that enables Transformer to learn dependency beyond a fixed length without disrupting temporal coherence. Concretely, it consists of a segment-level recurrence mechanism and a novel positional encoding scheme. Our method not only enables capturing longer-term dependency, but also resolves the problem of context fragmentation. As a result, Transformer-XL learns dependency that is about 80\% longer than RNNs and 450\% longer than vanilla Transformers, achieves better performance on both short and long sequences, and is up to 1,800+ times faster than vanilla Transformer during evaluation. Additionally, we improve the state-of-the-art (SoTA) results of bpc/perplexity from 1.06 to 0.99 on enwiki8, from 1.13 to 1.08 on text8, from 20.5 to 18.3 on WikiText-103, from 23.7 to 21.8 on One Billion Word, and from 55.3 to 54.5 on Penn Treebank (without finetuning). Our code, pretrained models, and hyperparameters are available in both Tensorflow and PyTorch. … Weight of Evidence (WoE) The Weight of Evidence or WoE value is a widely used measure of the ‘strength’ of a grouping for separating good and bad risk (default). It is computed from the basic odds ratio: (Distribution of Good Credit Outcomes) / (Distribution of Bad Credit Outcomes). Or the ratios of Distr Goods / Distr Bads for short, where Distr refers to the proportion of Goods or Bads in the respective group, relative to the column totals, i.e., expressed as relative proportions of the total number of Goods and Bads. Why Use Weight of Evidence? … Parallel Iterative Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (PARINOM) Matrix decomposition is ubiquitous and has applications in various fields like speech processing, data mining and image processing to name a few. Under matrix decomposition, nonnegative matrix factorization is used to decompose a nonnegative matrix into a product of two nonnegative matrices which gives some meaningful interpretation of the data. Thus, nonnegative matrix factorization has an edge over the other decomposition techniques. In this paper, we propose two novel iterative algorithms based on Majorization Minimization (MM)-in which we formulate a novel upper bound and minimize it to get a closed form solution at every iteration. Since the algorithms are based on MM, it is ensured that the proposed methods will be monotonic. The proposed algorithms differ in the updating approach of the two nonnegative matrices. The first algorithm-Iterative Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (INOM) sequentially updates the two nonnegative matrices while the second algorithm-Parallel Iterative Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (PARINOM) parallely updates them. We also prove that the proposed algorithms converge to the stationary point of the problem. Simulations were conducted to compare the proposed methods with the existing ones and was found that the proposed algorithms performs better than the existing ones in terms of computational speed and convergence. KeyWords: Nonnegative matrix factorization, Majorization Minimization, Big Data, Parallel, Multiplicative Update … https://analytixon.com/2023/05/01/if-you-did-not-already-know-2032/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

[jcmarchi]

This Isn’t Supposed to Happen: Troubleshooting the Impossible

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/this-isnt-supposed-to-happen-troubleshooting-the-impossible/

This Isn’t Supposed to Happen: Troubleshooting the Impossible

I recently rebuilt my portfolio (johnrhea.com). After days and days of troubleshooting and fixing little problems on my local laptop, I uploaded my shiny new portfolio to the server — and triumphantly watched it not work at all…

The browser parses and runs JavaScript, right? Maybe Chrome will handle something a little different from Firefox, but if the same code is on two different servers it should work the same in Chrome (or Firefox) no matter which server you look at, right? Right?

First, the dynamically generated stars wouldn’t appear and when you tried to play the game mode, it was just blank. No really terrible website enemies appeared, nor could they shoot any bad experience missiles at you, at least, not in the game mode, but I guess my buggy website literally sent a bad experience missile at you. Over on the page showing my work, little cars were supposed to zoom down the street, but they didn’t show up, either.

Let me tell you, there was no crying or tears of any kind. I was very strong and thrilled, just thrilled, to accept the challenge of figuring out what was going on. I frantically googled things like “What could cause JavaScript to act differently on two servers?”, “Why would a server change how JavaScript works?”, and “Why does everyone think I’m crying when I’m clearly not?” But to no avail.

There were some errors in the console, but not ones that made sense. I had an SVG element that we’ll call car (because that’s what I named it). I created it in vanilla JavaScript, added it to the page, and zoomed it down the gray strip approximating a street. (It’s a space theme where you can explore planets. It’s really cool. I swear.) I was setting transforms on car using car.style.transform and it was erroring out. car.style was undefined.

I went back to my code on my laptop. Executes flawlessly. No errors.

To get past the initial error, I switched it from car.style to using setAttribute e.g. car.setAttribute('style', 'transform: translate(100px, 200px)');. This just got me to the next error. car was erroring out on some data-* attributes I was using to hold information about the car, e.g. car.dataset.xspeed would also come back undefined when I tried to access them. This latter technology has been supported in SVG elements since 2015, yet it was not working on the server, and worked fine locally. What the Hoobastank could be happening? (Yes, I’m referencing the 1990s band and, no, they have nothing to do with the issue. I just like saying… errr… writing… their name.)

With search engines not being much help (mostly because the problem isn’t supposed to exist), I contacted my host thinking maybe some kind of server configuration was the issue. The very polite tech tried to help, checking for server errors and other simple misconfigurations, but there were no issues he could find. After reluctantly serving as my coding therapist and listening to my (tearless) bemoaning of ever starting a career in web development, he basically said they support JavaScript, but can’t really go into custom code, so best of luck. Well, thanks for nothing, person whom I will call Truckson! (That’s not his real name, but I thought “Carson” was too on the nose.)

Next, and still without tears, I tried to explain my troubles to ChatGPT with the initial prompt: “Why would JavaScript on two different web servers act differently?” It was actually kind of helpful with a bunch of answers that turned out to be very wrong.

Maybe there was an inline SVG vs SVG in an img issue? That wasn’t it.

Could the browser be interpreting the page as plain text instead of HTML through some misconfiguration? Nope, it was pulling down HTML, and the headers were correct.

Maybe the browser is in quirks mode? It wasn’t.

Could the SVG element be created incorrectly? You can’t create an SVG element in HTML using document.createElement('svg') because SVG actually has a different namespace. Instead, you have to use document.createElementNS("http://www.w3.org/2000/svg", 'svg'); because SVG and HTML use similar, but very different, standards. Nope, I’d used the createElementNS function and the correct namespace.

Sidenote: At several points during the chat session, ChatGPT started replies with, “Ah, now we’re getting spicy 🔥” as well as, “Ah, this is a juicy one. 🍇” (emojis included). It also used the word “bulletproof” a few times in what felt like a tech-bro kind of way. Plus there was a “BOOM. 💥 That’s the smoking gun right there”, as well as an “Ahhh okay, sounds like there’s still a small gremlin in the works.” I can’t decide whether I find this awesome, annoying, horrible, or scary. Maybe all four?

Next, desperate, I gave our current/future robot overlord some of my code to give it context and show it that none of these were the issue. It still harped on the misconfiguration and kept having me output things to check if the car element was an SVG element. Again, locally it was an SVG element, but on the server it came back that it wasn’t.

Maybe using innerHTML to add some SVG elements to the car element garbled the car element into not being an SVG element? ChatGPT volunteered to rewrite a portion of code to fix this. I put the new code into my system. It worked locally! Then I uploaded it to the server and… no dice. Same error was still happening.

I wept openly. I mean… I swallowed my emotions in a totally healthy and very manly way. And that’s the end of the article, no redemption, no solution, no answer. Just a broken website and the loud sobs of a man who doesn’t cry… ever…

…You still here?

Okay, you’re right. You know I wouldn’t leave you hanging like that. After the non-existent sob session, I complained to ChatGPT, it again gave me some console logs including having the car element print out its namespace and that’s when the answer came to me. You see the namespace for an SVG is this:

http://www.w3.org/2000/svg

What it actually printed was this:

https://www.w3.org/2000/svg

One letter. That’s the difference.

Normally you want everything to be secure, but that’s not really how namespaces work. And while the differences between these two strings is minimal, I might as well have written document.createElementNS("Gimme-them-SVGzers", "svg");. Hey, W3C, can I be on the namespace committee?

But why was it different? You’d be really mad if you read this far and it was just a typo in my code. Right?

You’ve invested some time into this article, and I already did the fake-out of having no answer. So, having a code typo would probably lead to riots in the streets and hoards of bad reviews.

Don’t worry. The namespace was correct in my code, so where was that errant “s” coming from?

I remembered turning on a feature in my host’s optimization plugin: automatically fix insecure pages. It goes through and changes insecure links to secure ones. In 99% of cases, it’s the right choice. But apparently it also changes namespace URLs in JavaScript code.

I turned that feature off and suddenly I was traversing the galaxy, exploring planets with cars zooming down gray pseudo-elements, and firing lasers at really terrible websites instead of having a really terrible website. There were no tears (joyful or otherwise) nor were there celebratory and wildly embarrassing dance moves that followed.

Have a similar crazy troubleshooting issue? Have you solved an impossible problem? Let me know in the comments.

[skinnydsyogurt]

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[yeonchi]

Koei Warriors Retrospective Part 20: Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate

Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate - Definitive Edition (無双OROCHI2 Ultimate - DX) Platforms: PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC Release dates: Japan: 26 September 2013 (PS3/Vita)/26 June 2014 (PS4)/4 September 2014 (Xbox One)/9 November 2017 (Switch)/12 July 2022 (PC - DX) USA: 2 September 2014 (PS4/Xbox One)/30 September 2014 (PS3/Vita, digital only)/12 July 2022 (PC - DX) Europe: 5 September 2014 (PS3/Vita, digital only/PS4/Xbox One)/12 July 2022 (PC - DX)

Last time, I was in the middle of covering Warriors Orochi 3 when I discovered that the post was starting to get a bit too long for comfort. As such, this post will be dedicated to covering the Ultimate expansion and the rant for this game when Alec and Shanna come back to me with their findings.

Considering that the Western localisations of the vanilla game came out 3-4 months after the Japanese release and the PS4 and Xbox One launched a couple of months after this expansion came out on the PS3 in Japan, I'm actually surprised they didn't chase the launch dates for those consoles, even with the PS4 launching in Japan about 3 months after the West. They did chase the Xbox One's launch date in Japan though, so it's weird why they didn't do it for the PS4 considering that everything was ready to go and, well, Sony is their main target console company of choice, after all. This expansion was also not released on the Xbox 360 meaning that such ports are now dead in the water, but I'll talk more about it when we cover DW8.

Apparently, console gaming was stronger in the West at the time of this game's launch, while mobile games and handheld gaming ruled the market in Japan because of their on-the-go lifestyle and their xenophobia making them prefer Japanese games over Western games. In 2016, Sony restructured Sony Computer Entertainment, changing its name to Sony Interactive Entertainment, and moved it under the umbrella of Sony America, symbolising the shifting demographics.

These factoids are but a preview to the divide between Koei Tecmo's Japanese and Western fanbases as I prepare to confront the Koei Tecmo New Normal Copium (again). The retrospective continues after the break.

Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate (Definitive Edition)

Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate is a game that can truly be called an expansion to its parent. Where WO2 was a continuation of WO1, it acted as an entirely separate game with no way to carry over save data or play stages from the first game on the second. The combined format of WOZ was only realised on the PS3 and PC in Asia, with an attempted localisation apparently being rejected by SCEA.

If you have save data from WO3 and you boot up Ultimate on the PS3, it will obviously ask you if you want to import your save data and carry over your progress (on Vita you can also carry over your progress from Special on the PSP). But what if you want to play Ultimate on the PS4 or the Vita? Can you import your PS3 save data from the vanilla game and can you transfer your Ultimate progress between those consoles? Yes. To import your PS3 save data, you need to upload it to PSN in Options > Save/Load, then download it when you create the Ultimate save data on the PS4 or the Vita. From there, you can use the Share Data option under Options > Save/Load to effectively sync your Ultimate save data between your PS3, Vita and PS4 via the PSN. This is what is known as cross-save.

DLC from the vanilla game will be made available in Ultimate for free, even if you're playing on Vita or PS4. This also goes for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One; while you can't transfer save data from the vanilla game for some reason, DLC does transfer over. Likewise, Ultimate DLC purchased for either the PS3, Vita or PS4 will also be available on the other two consoles. However, just because you bought Ultimate on say, the PS3, it doesn't mean you can get the Vita or PS4 versions digitally for free; this is what is known as cross-buy, and apparently, it's usually reserved for (AAA) first-party and indie games.

Apparently, playing online multiplayer between PS3/Vita/PS4, also known as cross-play is a thing, but from what I've read it's a bit finicky. I don't know if people have actually been able to do this, but the cross-play I'm thinking of is using the Vita as a second controller via Remote Play, which can be done.

These cross-platform functions are awesome and all, but there is one question that needs to be asked; does it need to go through the PSN? For cross-save in particular, why can't you just transfer saves via USB? I don't know how save files are managed between the PS3 and PS4, but in an ideal world, I should be able to connect a Vita to a PS3 via USB (or via Wi-Fi without having to go through the PSN) and transfer the save data from there. This is an important question that more people should be asking, especially considering the discourse around online stores/servers shutting down for older consoles and the fervour over buying physical copies of games for preservation.

Man, to think that this could have been in the retrospective for DW8 even though this is more about gaming in general. Anyway, let's get onto the story for Ultimate with the fifth chapter.

Some time after the good ending of the vanilla game, Sun Wukong was hanging with Da Ji and Himiko when they heard the voice of Orochi, telling them to fight so he could awaken himself. Guided by the voice, they followed its origin to a stone, confusing them. Seeing that Jiang Wei and Hanbei's armies were nearby at Hinokawa, they decided to attack them. Jiang Wei is captured and the others are defeated; when Da Ji's group put Jiang Wei in front of the stone, its power created a copy of him.

"Jiang Wei" returns to the Shu-Tokugawa Army and informs them that the Oda Army are working with Da Ji. Liu Bei leads his army to Honnōji to demand an explanation from Nobunaga. Just as Nobunaga is defeated, Jiang Wei arrives and criticises the Shu-Tokugawa Army for attacking him. When asked about this, Jiang Wei states that he didn't remember what happened after being captured, except that he did see a tail. This leads everyone to realise that the "Jiang Wei" from earlier was an imposter.

Ranmaru reports to Nobunaga that the Wei Army is advancing on Nanjun, possibly with the intention of attacking them. The Oda respond in kind, and they learn that the Wei Army are under the belief that the Oda attacked them first. After defeating Guo Jia and Zhenji, Mitsunari and Cao Pi lead an assault unit to attack the Oda camp. With the Wei Army defeated, Da Ji appears with a copy of Nobunaga.

Following the battle, Da Ji escapes and returns to the stone, which reveals not Orochi, but a woman named Tamamo, who wields a mirror in her hands. Nobunaga and his officers catch up to Da Ji, but Tamamo uses her mirror to absorb them into it, taking us to the sixth chapter.

Numerous officers across the lands begin disappearing as well, leading to the remaining officers heading out in search for them. Sima Shi, Masamune and Gracia lead an army to Ueda Castle in an attempt to find Da Ji, but when they do, she reveals Tamamo and seals them in the mirror along with Shennong and Kaguya, who had come just too late to stop her.

Inside the mirror world, Shennong tells everyone about Tamamo, that she was an evil spirit who was imprisoned for her misdeeds. Sakon, Ujiyasu and Wang Yuanji decide to explore the world and their party ends up in Kawanakajima, where they fight Sima Zhao, Lu Xun and Ginchiyo, whose armies believe them to be enemies. After the battle, Shennong and Kaguya meet up with them and they explain that they are inside the world of the Divine Mirror; presumably, the enemies that Sima Zhao's army fought were mirror images of the real thing. Kaguya cannot send anyone through time while they are in the mirror, so they have to focus on finding their friends.

We learn more about Tamamo and the Divine Mirror as other officers deal with mirror images of their friends. Since ancient times, Tamamo has been deceiving humans into fighting each other to feed on their sadness and anger, resulting in her being sealed within the Killing Stone. Kaguya senses that there is a rift in this realm that isn't completely shut, likely meaning that there is a way out of it.

Despite interference from mirror images preventing the heroes from escaping the realm, Shennong and Kaguya find the exit in Jiangdong and everyone escapes through it. The heroes confront Tamamo and Da Ji in Xu Province, then with the help of Fu Xi and Nuwa, Shennong has Tamamo sealed back into the Killing Stone. Peace returns to the land again... or so the heroes thought, for this is merely the good ending of Ultimate.

Shennong explains to the heroes that their battles with the Hydra and Orochi's power likely weakened the Killing Stone's power before Tamamo used Da Ji to create more negative power so she could free herself. As such, there is a chance that Tamamo could escape again and they need to complete the seal with the Divine Mirror if they want to stop her for good. However, because the Divine Mirror broke and lost its power when the heroes escaped the mirror realm, they need to go back in time to before then.

Aya, Shingen and Gan Ning go back to Ueda Castle before they were absorbed into the mirror realm in an attempt to find Tamamo. Tamamo is defeated and she offers the Divine Mirror up to the heroes. Shingen goes to take it and Gan Ning pushes him out of the way as Tamamo uses the mirror; when they get back up, they see that Tamamo has disappeared, leaving the Divine Mirror behind.

The heroes discover that the mirror is cracked; Shennong and Kaguya realise that this was the source of the rift that allowed them to escape. They are unable to seal Tamamo with the mirror in its current state because if they did, she would be able to escape. Shingen suggests that they go back to a point in time before the mirror was even broken, but they would need to find out when it happened first.

The rest of the Coalition are informed about Tamamo and were asked to help find her while continuing to deal with her imposter plots across the land, resulting in certain individuals being revealed to have tails upon their defeat. The tails gathered where Tamamo was hiding at Itsukushima and the Coalition confront her and Da Ji there. After interrogating Tamamo and losing her due to Da Ji's actions, Fu Xi realises that they have to go back to the Mystic Realm, long ago before Orochi created this combined dimension.

The Divine Mirror was a treasure of the Mystic Realm used to imprison evil spirits. Long ago, it was in the possession of the Heavenly Emperor before it went missing after he was assassinated by Orochi. Fu Xi takes some of the Coalition and Kaguya sends them back into his past in the hope that he can save the Heavenly Emperor, which he failed to do back then as the other mystics were fighting demons at the time.

In the seventh chapter, Fu Xi's group joins up with fellow mystic Yinglong and they work to purge demons from the Mystic Realm. Though the demons are defeated, they end up surviving the battle due to their leader's power and retreating. As Yinglong wonders who the demons' leader is, he is approached by Tamamo, who informs him that the Heavenly Emperor is using the Divine Mirror to control them.

Fu Xi's group was unable to catch up with the demons, so they decide to hurry over to the Heavenly Emperor's Palace to rescue him and Yinglong. When they get there, the palace is overrun by demons; Fu Xi explains that the Divine Mirror's power is not unlimited and it could lose its power if the demons are too powerful or too great in number. They get to the throne room just as Yinglong confronts the Heavenly Emperor, having witnessed the latter using the Divine Mirror and believed Tamamo's words for himself. Yinglong snatches the mirror and attempts to destroy it, but the mirror cracks and releases a miasma that turns Yinglong into... Orochi. Fu Xi's group prevents Orochi from killing the Heavenly Emperor and they escape the palace with him in tow.

Fu Xi suspects that Orochi's desire for destruction was born from the power of all the demons imprisoned within the mirror, but if you've played WOZ and listened to the subtext, Orochi sought to find a worthy challenger who could end his life, perhaps out of atonement for being fooled by Tamamo or a hatred for what had become of himself. This gives Orochi a more sympathetic backstory as the fires he lit were constantly being spread by others like Da Ji and Kiyomori. It also begs the question of why the Mystics didn't send the DW and SW characters back to their own times after the events of the first two games, but that's neither here nor there.

Orochi begins wreaking destruction as he is apparently spotted at the Wuhang Mountains. Because Susano'o was busy with the demons, he sent Sun Wukong and a "human" Nezha to deal with Orochi, and so they are joined by Fu Xi and his group. They encounter some mystic officers on the way, but they turn on them for some reason. When other mystics arrive and attack them, the group deduces that Tamamo has to be involved and they decide to find her first. Upon being confronted, Tamamo reveals that she has regained their power thanks to Yinglong and that she was the one who was in charge of the demons attacking the Mystic Realm.

Tamamo manages to escape as the Heavenly Emperor recovers from his injuries. He states that he can repair the crack in the Divine Mirror, but it needs to be done in a pure environment and the Mystic Realm is enveloped in miasma thanks to Orochi's presence, so the Heavenly Emperor needs to imprison Orochi first. As such, Fu Xi's group, including Lu Bu and Nezha, head to Koshi Castle to fight Orochi. Nezha is the first to fight Orochi, but he ends up being defeated by him. Fu Xi's group cuts through the army of demons and defeats Orochi, allowing the Heavenly Emperor to imprison him in the Wuhang Mountains, thus setting the stage for the events of WOZ.

The Heavenly Emperor states that Yinglong's soul has changed upon becoming Orochi, hence the Yinglong that the mystics knew is no more. He repairs the Divine Mirror and hands it to Fu Xi's group so they can use it to seal Tamamo for good in the future. As for Nezha, Susano'o would revive him and turn him into his cyborg form, but without the memories of his former self.

Fu Xi's group returns to the present with the complete Divine Mirror as the eighth chapter begins. The Coalition confronts Tamamo at Wan Castle, but when they arrive, they find Lu Bu's army camped there, who suspects them to be on Tamamo's side. Nezha arrives and accompanies the Coalition to the castle; Lu Bu is convinced that they are imposters, but Lu Xun believes Lu Bu to be the imposter. Lu Xun has a letter sent to Chen Gong, who decides to confirm it for himself; when Lu Bu refuses to move upon hearing that Nezha and Tadakatsu are outside, Lu Xun's suspicions end up being confirmed and Chen Gong sides with the coalition. Tamamo arrives upon "Lu Bu's" defeat and reveals Nezha to be another imposter as well. The Coalition defeats Tamamo and prepares to seal her inside the Divine Mirror, but she deflects it, revealing her true form as the nine-tailed fox, Kyūbi.

Kyūbi has the power to impersonate people and can use her tails to do so as well. With her power to create demons, Kyūbi remains a threat that still needs to be dealt with. After pursuing her through Dongkou, they finally confront Kyūbi once and for all at Odawara Castle. Her tails take on the form of Ujiyasu, the three lords of the Three Kingdoms or the Sengoku Era, Cao Pi, Kiyomasa, Shuten Dōji and Orochi X; even a tail takes on her own form as a decoy while she attempts to escape, but the Coalition catches up with her and defeats her, sealing her within the Divine Mirror for good.

The mystics descend and gather the Coalition together, retrieving the Divine Mirror and thanking them for their help before sending them back to their own times for good. This is the true ending of Ultimate.

After this, a set of Divine Mirror stages (marked in English as "Mirror Realm" but they're not actually set there, go fuck yourself, Koei Tecmo) will be unlocked, allowing you to expose the imposters created by Kyūbi's tails. They don't contribute to the story and they allow you to obtain a weapon orb (or two) depending on the difficulty you play in. You'll also unlock two stages detailing how Tamamo/Kyūbi was sealed in the Killing Stone in the first place, then there is a trio of stages showing Kyūbi in the mirror realm, using her tails to fight the reflections within the realm and recruit servants for herself so she can take her "revenge" on the "mystics".

On top of this, there are other Ultimate-exclusive stages set in the main saga that follow certain groups and show battles from different points of view. Some of these tie into some of the vanilla game's DLC stages, like the one with Kiyomori recruiting puppets for his army. All in all, combined with the new stages added in Special and Hyper, Ultimate contains double the stages of the vanilla game and much more if you include the DLC.

Although the new stages take place after the good ending of the vanilla game, it's actually recommended that you unlock all characters and play the true ending before you start the fifth chapter. Apparently, the wiki says that camp conversations won't happen unless all the relevant characters have been unlocked, but for some reason, the conversations still happen (at least for me) if I haven't unlocked one of the characters. Maybe Koei Tecmo should have been clearer with this requirement and made it so you have to clear the normal, good and true endings of the vanilla game first before you can begin the new chapters.

Before starting a stage in Story Mode or Free Mode, you can select which character you want to start the battle with on top of what team you would like to play with. Also, a funny thing about recommended characters; human Nezha is a recommended character in Chapter 7's War in the Mystic Realm when he is unlocked after clearing that exact same stage, so one of your current team's characters ends up getting carried over if you're playing this battle for the first time and you decide to play as the recommended team. Why couldn't human Nezha have been unlocked after clearing the previous stage when Yinglong was unlocked after clearing Chapter 6?

A new camp design has been introduced for Ultimate which is unlocked when you start Chapter 5. There is also a temporary Mystic Realm camp design that is seen during Chapter 7. There is no way to switch camp designs, but a modified version of the old camp design can be seen in Gauntlet Mode.

As is obvious, the characters who debuted in Special and Hyper appear again in Ultimate with a few new additions exclusive to the expansion:

Tamamo

Yinglong

Nezha (human)

Kyūbi

Hundun

Xu Shu (Dynasty Warriors 7 Empires)

Kasumi (Dead or Alive)

Sterkenberg (Atelier)

Sophitia (Soulcalibur)

All in all, there are a total of 145 characters in Ultimate. And look, while that is a lot of characters to be voiced, it should be noted that several voice actors do voice multiple characters, so while the number is still great, it's not as bad as you think.

As stated, the three new characters from Samurai Warriors Chronicles 2nd are not included even though this game was released a year after it. Sophitia's inclusion in this game is interesting considering that Soulcalibur is a Bandai Namco franchise and there are other characters from other Koei Tecmo franchises they could have used, like Toukiden. Don't think they couldn't have done it; Warriors All-Stars included William from Nioh and they were released nearly two months apart; Toukiden being released three months before WO3U is nothing. This creates a problem for my take on a potential alternate WO4, but to keep it simple, I replaced Sophitia with Zhou Cang from DW9.

Some changes have been made to the battle mechanics in Ultimate. All characters gain a new aerial Type Action, Technique type characters gain a new evasion step ability can can be triggered when attacked, pressing the down button allows you to change battle styles, aka summon your inactive characters to fight alongside you in battle, and holding down the up button allows you to summon your horse and automatically mount it, something which was implemented in DW8 (why couldn't they have kept it on the down button?). Also, True Triple Attacks can now be performed on horseback.

Triple Rushes can be performed when switching characters after landing Charge Attacks. This will allow inactive characters to tag in and perform attacks on enemies before coming back to your character. Special Triple Rushes can be performed when you have certain characters in your team and you start a Triple Rush from a specific character. No matter which direction you go for a Special Triple Rush, they will always go in the same order.

When all three characters in your team are on the battlefield with full Musou Gauges, you can perform a True Musou Burst with them. You can do this with up to 6 characters, whether with your team in Gauntlet Mode or with characters who you have a high friendship with. It's just like the Double Musou Attack but with more characters.

A new item, the Book of Enlightenment, has been introduced in this game. It's a power-up that allows you to farm 300 EXP from every enemy you defeat for 20 seconds. You can bring your character up 10 levels with it, but there are two problems I have with it; one, EXP items only level up the character you're using so your team's levels can become unbalanced if you're trying to balance them out, and two, there is no indicator added for this power-up like with the other stat buffs, so you can't tell if it's active or not. You'll randomly get one of these in each battle (two if you're playing on Chaos).

Battlefield Bonuses can be activated just before starting a battle by pressing Square, which will cost you 100,000 gems. Activating it will allow you to obtain stronger weapons (including weapons with ridonculous attack boosts) and gives you more chances of finding Books of Enlightenment.

I said in the vanilla game that you can't directly add specific attributes to your weapon unless you have another weapon that has it first. This is now possible in Ultimate; through playing the Divine Mirror stages or Gauntlet Mode, you'll be able to obtain weapon orbs that can be equipped onto your weapon to add +5 to a particular attribute (I wish it were +1 instead though). This will also cost a small amount of gems as well. Weapon orbs can also be crafted with two of an item dropped by a particular soldier type and one of a crafting material, along with 1000 gems and 1 crystal.

New weapon attributes are also available, including attributes that combine the powers of two elements. There is also a Tri-Element attribute that gives you the power of Flame, Ice and Bolt; when coupled with the Windslay attribute, your weapon would become more of a unstoppable destroyer than it already is.

Five-star mystic and X weapons are now available for all characters. Mystic weapons are obtained similar to how rare weapons are obtained in other games (usually on stages where they are recommended characters in) and crafting X weapons require two of a characters' personal item (found by obtaining the red orbs when defeating officers on higher miasma) and one of a crafting material, along with 20,000 gems and 2 crystals. Maxing out the compatibility gauge gives you +18 for mystic weapons and +99 for X weapons. Something to note for the Vita version is that the KO requirements for obtaining mystic weapons are 75% that of the PS3 version.

The EXP stock cap has been expanded tenfold to 999,999 instead of 99,999 from the vanilla game. In addition, the maximum level is now 100 instead of 99; when characters reach level 100, they can receive a promotion, meaning that their level is reset back to 1 and they gain two extra item slots, a second skill and upgrade gems every time they level up which can be used to permanently upgrade a stat. On the second promotion, they get two more item slots. Characters can be promoted up to 9 times (formerly 3), with extra bonuses available from the fourth promotion onwards.

Under the items, saddles (or stirrups for some reason) are now a separate category, giving characters back an item slot. Saddles remain shared amongst your team. With the promotion system, characters can carry up to six items after being appropriately promoted. New items and rare items are obtainable in Gauntlet Mode.

Free Mode is now in a menu format with battles able to be sorted by chapter or battlefield like in DW8. Duel Mode is carried over from Hyper and once again, I wish Battle Royale Mode was carried over from Special.

Musou Battlefields are now upgraded to Musou Battlefields X in Asian versions. The 50 point cost limit has been removed and you can now create up to 100 of your own battle dialogues and messages to swap out. Battle dialogues can be up to 120 characters long (40 in Asian versions) while battle messages are up to 60 characters long (22 in Asian versions. Battle messages can only be swapped after testing the stage once, which will populate the message timeline. The only catch with creating your own battle dialogues is that no voices will be played when they are displayed - now wouldn't that be a golden opportunity for AI voices?

Gauntlet Mode, or Unlimited Mode in Japanese, is a new mode for this game. This mode is set in a world of chaos brought about by the Hydra's appearance causing distortions in space and time that also affected other worlds. To put it simply, this mode is Chaos difficulty on steroids.

The default characters you start with are Zhao Yun, Zhang Fei, Hanzō, Mitsunari and Aya, but you can choose a team of 5 characters from those unlocked in Story Mode. Other characters are unlocked when you defeat them in this mode and obtain a Sworn Ally Bond of Fate (the wording in the English version is atrocious, I know) for that character, which you can use to unlock them. Any remaining bonds can be used to directly increase friendship levels with them and before you say that it's a waste of resources, keep in mind that each character has their own friendship levels with every character in this game.

This mode has you fight enemies in battlefield-shaped dungeons as you open treasure chests and follow the Dragon Portals to find the escape point. Each dungeon will be filled with a miasma that will grow stronger as time goes on. Dungeons can be made up of 1-3 battlefields, and dungeons that display red text are Extreme Dungeons, which contain roid rage battlefields where miasma increases dramatically and enemies become significantly stronger. In exchange, you can also obtain greater rewards. Sometimes there are missions (up to 3) that you can complete as well.

By activating the Dragon Portals by holding L1, special effects can be activated on the first activation, such as discovering hidden treasure chests, revealing escape points, recovering your health and Musou or activating the effects of the Scroll of Enlightenment on purple portals. After a short cooldown time, they can be activated again to reduce the miasma level and recover your Formation Skill Gauge.

Treasure chests can contain materials, gems and crystals, but they can also affect the miasma of the area, cause enemy officers to appear (particularly when opening red treasure chests on Extreme Dungeons), eliminate enemies in the area or teleport you to a faraway Dragon Portal among other effects. Some treasure chests are initially shrouded in miasma and won't be openable until it goes away.

Before going into battle, you can select three Formation skills to use in battle (why can't it be five?). Red formations provide temporary stat buffs, green formations conjure effects against enemies (that can be combined for greater effects) and blue formations focus on searching, which causes your team members to spread out and explore the dungeon. Your team's stats are also affected depending on what formation you switch to, plus formations can be maxed out to level 10 the more you use them. Formations are unlocked when you unlock certain characters or a certain amount of characters. Formation Skills are activated with R3 and they take up a portion of the Formation Skill gauge. Each formation has five skills that are allocated to a character based on their position when you save your team lineup.

Sometimes, powerful opponents can appear from other worlds, but they yield greater rewards. Saddles cannot be used in this mode and you will only be able to keep the materials and items you obtained if you escape all battlefields in a dungeon. If all five members of your team are defeated before they get a chance to respawn, you lose the game and you only keep the EXP you earned.

In the camp, the mystic will have a list of missions you can do, of which you can accept five at a time. Clearing those missions will yield you with gems, crystals, weapon orbs and sometimes rare items. A couple problems I have with the rewards system; one, in the English version, the Repel Curse Sorcerers mission actually requires you to defeat 500 Charm Sorcerers, Curse Sorcerers being the next rank up (once again, go fuck yourself Koei Tecmo), and two, the Repel missions should be merged by soldier category and rank so they can be done faster (even if they up the number requirement), so things like Rikishi/Ozeki, Bandits/Thieves and Archers/Flame Archers/Inferno Archers should be merged. If you're focusing on higher levels and harder dungeons, then you won't be looking for base-tier soldiers on easier dungeons.

Unlocking dungeons requires the use of keystones. There are four types of keystones; red, yellow, blue and purple, and each colour is unlocked when you complete Gauntlet Mode and replay from the beginning up to three times. You can also pay five keystones to shuffle the contents of a dungeon and alter it.

There are four levels of dungeons and in each of the first three is a barrier to the next level. Barrier dungeons have three battlefields and the third one is a fixed battlefield with fixed characters; you'll face off against Nobunaga, Cao Cao or Susano'o and Orochi. The escape point is unlocked only after defeating the stage's boss. At the final barrier, you'll face off against Hundun, who summons a whole bunch of mighty officers for you to fight. Defeating Hundun here clears Gauntlet Mode and allows the worlds to be separated as Hundun goes back into his slumber. As stated, you can replay Gauntlet Mode from the beginning, which allows you to unlock the next keystone tier.

Gauntlet Mode can also be played with two players online and offline, but both players share the same five characters to switch from. All in all, Gauntlet Mode can be a fun, yet challenging mode that milks the characters and battlefields for all their worth. Character growth and weapons are reflected between Story, Free and Gauntlet Modes.

A new colour edit function akin to SW3 is available after clearing Chapter 8 in Story Mode or from the start in Gauntlet Mode. Only the standard costumes can be colour-edited and the editing of some parts are limited on Team NINJA collaboration characters.

Ultimate-exclusive DLC is available, and it's more recycled content as the fantasy costumes, original school-themed costumes and the 5 DW1 character costumes, taken from DW7's DLC, are among those included. New alternate costumes for characters who were added in ports are added (interestingly, Xu Shu gets a "disguise costume" instead of a Fury form costume).

Instead of new Story Mode scenarios, the new stages in the Ultimate DLC are 10 new dungeons for Gauntlet Mode. Three of them contain stages where you can obtain mystic weapons for all members of your team when the requirements are fulfilled:

Koshi Castle: Lower all four drawbridges in an anti-clockwise direction starting from the north, then defeat Orochi within 3:30 minutes.

Liaodong: Achieve 2000 KOs before defeating Diamondback, Dodomeki and Gyūki for the first time, then when they reappear, defeat them again within 10 minutes. The player must not be defeated at all during this.

Heavenly Emperor's Palace: Defeat Hundun.

Normally you can only have one mystic weapon in Story Mode, but this allows you to bypass that limitation.

There are also three more dungeons set in Mt. Xingshi, Koshi Castle X and the Wuhang Mountains that are available on the PS4 and Xbox One as "cross-save bonuses", but are unlocked after clearing Gauntlet Mode once. For some reason, they are not included on the Switch and PC ports that came out later on. Speaking of which...

Around the time this game was released in the West, people were begging Koei Tecmo on their socials for PC ports of games, particularly with DW8XL being their first PC port to be released on Steam. Even with the hate from opinion-neutrals and the requests for a PC port being forgotten for years, Koei Tecmo would port this game to the Nintendo Switch in 2017 (exclusive to Japan) and on PC via Steam in 2022. Both these ports were released as DX/Definitive Editions (though not marked on the Switch port) with most, if not all of the DLC included, like DW7 before it.

Thanks to this, I can use a trainer on the game so I can steamroll my way through Gauntlet Mode without dying. For those of you who are about to accuse me of cheating or being a l337 hax0r, one, I don't give a fuck, and two, I played the PS3 port of Ultimate for 9 months and unlocked Hundun in Gauntlet Mode without cheats before I decided to get the PC port.

Also, I wish I knew that I could transfer my save from RPCS3 to the PC port, but at least by starting from scratch I could experience the game in full, even if for a second time. You can also decrypt and transfer your PS3 and PS4 data to this game as well and continue your progress from where you left off. It's honestly a miracle that this is even possible and it makes me wonder how some games are built for different platforms and consoles.

A protip when playing the PC port, courtesy of worldbolding: If you have a monitor with a higher refresh rate, then you might get glitches like this when activating some attacks with some characters. The screenshot shows it happening on Ma Chao’s Musou Attack, but in my experience, this also happens on Huang Gai and Sophitia’s Musou Attacks, all three of which are targeted attacks.

To fix this glitch, you need to change the refresh rate to 60 Hz (or lower) in Advanced display settings, which can be accessed (in Windows) by right clicking on the desktop and going to Display settings, then scrolling down to under Multiple displays.

The game is available in English, Japanese and Chinese (Traditional/Simplified), and unlike DW7XLDE, the language is set through your Steam client, but for me, all I have to do is change one line in an .ini file. Take note, however, that changing the game's language means that whatever messages you entered for Musou Battlefields or party names in Gauntlet Mode will be erased. Keep this in mind for DW9E.

Now that all is said and done, there is still one more topic I've left for last, because it's the reason why I started the Koei Warriors Rant Series back in 2014, and by extension, why I started the Koei Warriors Retrospective ten years later in 2024. That topic is, of course, the subject of Western localisation and English dubbing.

A few months ago, after the DW6 retrospective, I sent my assistants, the Tandy Computer Whiz Kids Alec and Shanna, on an assignment to find out why Koei Tecmo stopped dubbing their games. I even called in a favour from the Kwisatz Haderach (who I previously pissed off in an unseen adventure and had to be on his beck and call to atone for my offences) to see if Alec and Shanna could find anything that I didn't know since starting the Koei Warriors Rant Series. And if I'm right, they should be coming back to the studio right... now.

*KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK*

"Come in," Azuma said. It was Alec and Shanna, who had just returned from their research assignment with the Kwisatz Haderach. "Ahh, you're back. Is all your research in that file?"

"Yes, my lord," said Alec and Shanna, handing over their files of research to Azuma.

Azuma spent the next few minutes shuffling through their research, looking for anything that was significantly different enough from his past view and opinions to interest him. Unfortunately...

"Are you sure this research is independent?" Azuma questioned. "You didn't just go through my old rants from 10 years ago and grabbed whatever links were in there?"

"My lord, we can assure you that this research is independent," Alec replied.

"Yeah. We followed all the leads and a lot of them said the same things. Even the Kwisatz Haderach got in contact with some people who worked for Koei Tecmo or other Japanese gaming companies and they said similar things too," Shanna added.

"Are you sure those people actually worked where they said they worked and they weren't fanboys thinking they knew better than the companies themselves?" asked Azuma.

"My lord, why would you doubt the power of the Kwisatz Haderach? He stands above this world and has connections we could never get close to having," said Shanna.

"Exactly. If the Kwisatz Haderach couldn't get the truth out of those people, then who could?" said Alec.

Azuma grumbled, "Great. I've wasted three months trying to prove everyone, including myself, wrong and all I got was the same things I got 10 years ago. Listen guys, I need some time to process this. You're both dismissed."

"Yes, my lord," said Alec and Shanna as they left Azuma's studio.

Rant: English dubbing and Western localisation (Addressing the Rant Series)

As stated at the start of the last post, Warriors Orochi 3 was the first mainline game to be localised to the West without English dubbing. Samurai Warriors Chronicles was the first Koei Warriors game to receive such treatment, followed by Dynasty Warriors 7 Empires.

The first time I noticed something wrong about this was back in 2013, when I watched gameplay footage of WO3 and noticed that there were no English voices anywhere. I let it pass for a while, then when I learnt that Ultimate wouldn't be dubbed, I wrote the initial rant that started the Koei Warriors Rant Series.

Despite the 2.5 year gap between the release of the vanilla game and Ultimate, or the subsequent 8 year gap between the release of Ultimate on the PS4 and the PC, Koei Tecmo have made no effort to make up for it by redubbing the game in English and releasing the dub as (paid) DLC. Hell, even if the PSN stores on the PS3 and Vita are essentially on life support, or dead in the case of the Xbox Live Marketplace for the Xbox 360, they could still make the DLC available for the PS4 and Xbox One, which would also make it available to PS5 and Xbox Series players due to backward compatibility. By extension, if the English dub DLC were published years ago, then the Definitive Edition would have come out with dual audio. And frankly, why not? If Koei Tecmo could rerelease their old games on PC, then anything's possible.

One of the consequences of Koei Tecmo's decision not to dub their games is that they could only be sold digitally (on PSN) in the US. This is because, apparently, SCEA tends not to approve games for physical release if they don't have an English voice track. "But then how could Ultimate on PS4 be released physically in the US?" I'm guessing that this rule or whatever only applied up to the PS3 and PS Vita, then SCEA decided to scrap the rule for the PS4 and beyond, because a lot of sub-only Japanese games on the PS4 have received physical releases in the US since then. Mind you, this is the same SCEA who, apparently, refused to let WOZ, SW2HD or SW3Z be localised because they refused to publish games that were already released on other consoles first or they refused to sell two updated games in one package at full price. SCEA really hated money or sub purists for some reason back then, didn't they?

The most popular reason that people tend to parrot as to why Japanese gaming companies don't dub their games when localising to the West is... money. People will claim that they don't have the budget to produce voice dubbing in other languages, let alone English, and while I can understand an indie or amateur publisher going the sub-only route, when it comes to bigger companies like Koei Tecmo, what's the science- I mean, finance behind it? How much budget did WO3 receive compared to other games and how much of it went into publishing, localisation or other things?

One cause that I associate Koei Tecmo's money issues to is their exclusivity deal with Nintendo to publish SW3 in the West. Presumably because of this deal, SW3 ended up being a Wii exclusive in the West and Koei Tecmo could only localise games in its generation that were released on Nintendo consoles. The poor sales of Samurai Warriors Chronicles in the West ultimately led to Koei Tecmo deciding not to localise its expansion. These two factors ended up crippling the reception of Samurai Warriors in the West and likely led to Koei Tecmo deciding not to dub their games, including future Samurai Warriors games. There's also the Koei-Tecmo merger of 2008-09 that happened because Tecmo spent a lot of money fighting lawsuits from former employees and Koei spent a lot of money to merge with them as a result, so that's also a factor there.

Another likely cause of the money issues is the nicheness of their games and the lack of advertising. Everywhere I look, there is advertising and promotions for various Western games and some major Japanese franchises like Mario Bros, Sonic or Pokemon, but I rarely see a lot of other Japanese games being advertised in the West, especially Koei Warriors games. With games adapted from popular media franchises, including anime and manga franchises, their appeal and marketing is normally targeted to fans of those series, meaning that people become aware of those games because it's a series they know and love. With Koei Tecmo, all the promotion they do for their games is usually on their social media pages and on gaming news websites by gaming journalists. Maybe they have targeted ads on YouTube but what the hell would I know, I use an adblocker. OK, that's for the desktop, but even on my phone, I've never seen an ad for a Koei Tecmo game EVER.

Throughout the course of my rants, two possible solutions to alleviate the budget issue came to mind; reuse voice lines from source games, and crowdfund an English dub. There's a bigger case for the former considering Koei Tecmo's autoerotic assetflipsiation, but unfortunately, not so much for the latter, and to explain that, we need to go on a tangent about crowdfunding.

In July 2011, Capcom announced that production on Mega Man Legends 3 was cancelled. Despite a fan campaign petitioning Capcom to continue production on the game, Capcom quashed the fanbase's hopes by confirming that there were no plans to resume development. The idea of using Kickstarter to fund the development of the game was floated around, the OP bringing up how Tim Shafer of Double Fine Productions crowdfunded the game that would become Broken Age as an example, however then-Senior Vice President Christian Svensson, aka Sven, disagreed with the idea. He stated that Double Fine was able to pull this off because they didn't have the capital to self-fund, but if a publisher that had the capital - like EA, Activision or Capcom - were to try it, there would be backlash of some kind (but then again, when does anything not get backlash anyway?).

The person who told me about this back in 2016 also pointed out how crowdfunding has potential for misuse, citing the Mighty No. 9 Kickstarter controversy as an example of it. My rebuttal to them and suggestion to Koei was that they crowdfund only the dub and localisation - the game's already done at this point - but despite this, I actually agreed with him regarding the potential for misuse. Looking back though, I've realised that while my crowdfunding idea seems good on paper, it may not go the way I envisioned it to.

The two main models of crowdfunding are the all-or-nothing model utilised by Kickstarter where a project is only funded if it reaches the goal set by the creator, and the flexible model seen on other sites like Indiegogo where creators can keep whatever money is raised regardless of the goal. If Koei Tecmo wanted to gauge the interest for an English dub, they would probably go with the all-or-nothing model and it'd really be just a paid survey. At least if the Kickstarter fails then fans will better know who to blame. But here's something I never realised back then - if the Kickstarter succeeds, who's to say that Koei Tecmo won't hire Voicegroup to do the dub? Who's to say that the quality of the dub won't be as good as other games?

In regards to my point about reusing archived voice lines, someone replied to my initial rant something on the lines of "no, you can't just do that," and I want to clarify that this would be a cost-cutting and time-saving measure to reduce the need to rerecord generic system lines. Hell, even I said that I was okay with a partial dub, whether the new lines would remain in Japanese or be silent; if that's what creating your own lines in Musou Battlefields is, then why not just make that the entire game?

Speaking of Musou Battlefields, I made a little joke earlier about how it would be a golden opportunity to implement AI voices. The subject of AI never came up back then because the most that AI got up to was chatbots like Evie or Cleverbot; even Siri was in its infancy back then and you couldn't replicate people's voices as perfectly as you can nowadays. Hell, the most that people ever got was kichiku (鬼畜) videos on Bilibili were people remixed memes into Vocaloids. That takes more effort than setting up AI models for people to use, amusing though it may be.

To restate a post I made back in March 2023, given the discourse around AI voice acting which has come up following the discourse around AI art and development of text-to-speech software to the point where it is conceivably possible to imitate the voice of literally anyone in the world as perfectly as possible, I find myself wondering if, in 2014 when I started the Koei Warriors Rant Series, I would support AI voice acting being used as a cheaper alternative to hiring a studio, especially one that uses union voice actors.

This topic opens many cans of worms, particularly in regards to ethics and paying voice actors for the use of their likenesses. To be honest, I probably would have found myself conflicted on both sides of the argument; I would support AI voice acting if it meant we could get a dubbed game, but I would also want to see the actors being paid in some way as well, meaning that I couldn't support it. Then again, the subject has never come up back in 2014 because back then, we only had synthesised voices in text-to-speech programs.

In the end, however, I don’t believe AI will be a perfect replacement for the real thing and while AI voice acting may seem like an adequate stopgap, it will end up being a disgrace to not only the voice actors whose likenesses are being used, but to the fans, particularly dub fans, who would expect better from Koei Tecmo with their laziness. Between using AI to dub a game or leaving the game with the original Japanese voices, it’s a lose-lose situation for Koei Tecmo and dub fans; the only people who win are the sub fans and opinion-neutrals who wouldn’t care either way.

Since July 2024, SAG-AFTRA union voice actors have gone on strike against the same 11 companies they struck against in 2017 after failing to negotiate protection agreements for the use of AI to replicate the likenesses of voice actors. Since November 2024, SAG-AFTRA has managed to lock down a deal for minimum rates and AI protections in game localisations.

So why exactly did I begin the Koei Warriors Rant Series (and Dub Logistics) to rant about the lack of English dubs in localised Japanese games anyway? Was it because I couldn't read? No, I'm fully capable of reading subtitles while focusing on the action, especially since despite the amount of enemies on the screen, the AI is easy enough that it's a joke (though DWOrigins may beg to differ). Was it because I hated the Japanese voices? No, I've played games that have only Japanese voices because that was the only version I could get. Was it because I was an entitled fanboy who kept begging for dubs without understanding why they weren't possible?

If you assumed it was for any of those reasons, you would be wrong. As I would later come to realise, I started the Koei Warriors Rant Series because I wanted to play the games in English, dubbed by Voicegroup and the union voice actors who had been dubbing Koei Warriors games since Dynasty Warriors 4. I wanted to hold Koei Tecmo accountable for their decision not to dub their games and get an answer from them as to why. After seeing the toxic discourse from sub fans and opinion-neutrals who would seek to shut people down, cancel them for having controversial opinions or even celebrate the fact that games wouldn't be dubbed, I wanted to expose them and hold them accountable for their comments, turning their own toxicity back on them. I also hated how people brushed off the lack of English dubs as a small or insignificant issue because it clearly wasn't to me, and it's clear that the issue has snowballed over the years and that the problem is deeper than I initially thought.

As much as Koei Tecmo themselves are to blame for splitting the fanbase, the sub fans and opinion-neutrals in the fanbase are just as much to blame for not standing with dub fans, hence why I said that they were selfish and they dragged the dub fans down with them. Sure, maybe I'm guilty of being entitled or having toxic nostalgia, that I've constantly ragged on games not having English dubs that I never stopped to realise how great these games could be, but that was because back then, I had no way to play these games and when I did find a way, I took the chance to course correct and create the Koei Warriors Retrospective, a revived Rant Series that actually talks about the games themselves. Regardless, I did what I had to do because I'm a fan of Koei Tecmo and Koei Warriors games and I wanted Koei Tecmo and their fanbase to do better, even if it meant becoming toxic myself to call out the toxicity within the fanbase.

Chin Soon Sun, aka inspchin, was the community manager at Koei Tecmo Europe from 2008 to his resignation in 2016. In 2005, Chin founded the Koei Warriors website and forums, which become so popular and influential to the point that he was scouted by KTE in 2008 to be their sales and marketing executive before officially becoming their community manager in 2011. Chin was an influential figure in the Koei Tecmo fanbase to the point where even fans in the US considered him their community manager as well.

I've blamed Chin for not fighting hard enough for English dubs in Koei Tecmo games or not explaining why it couldn't be done. Over the past few years however, I've come to realise that maybe I was wrong to blame Chin and that he did what he could despite me thinking back then that he didn't do enough. What I've also realised is that Koei Tecmo Japan are entirely responsible for the development, publishing and localisation of their games and their American and European divisions are only responsible for sales and marketing (they also had a Canadian division that assisted in development but they shut down in 2013).

That being said, Chin was only a community manager and as much as I love to hear stories from fanboys about how he helped get this game and that game localised in the West, I think these people give him too much credit. In my opinion, there was only so much influence Chin had over things as most decisions were made by their head office in Japan (and presumably still are) and knowing Japanese companies, the opinions of their fans, especially the West, wouldn't matter after their decisions were announced. Also, Chin was probably under some NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) as well which meant that he couldn't reveal the details behind the decisions of head office, or maybe he was just in the dark about everything and he can only speculate like everyone else. If Chin isn't under any permanent NDAs then I invite him to give some insight into this whole debacle if he wishes.

While I acknowledge that I may have been a bit hard on Chin during the Rant Series days, I'm not going to let him off the hook that easy for his attitude towards the fanbase. He never answered everyone's questions or concerns, he fuelled the toxicity between dub and sub fans when he mistakenly reported that DW8E would have dual audio then corrected himself to say that it would only have Japanese voices, and he even brushed off fans in a deleted tweet complaining about the lack of English dubs, Vita ports or physical releases. And all the people who worshipped Chin like he was the god of the Koei Tecmo fanbase needed to wake up, realise that he wasn't perfect and hold him accountable for his bullshit. He was just as complicit in this debacle as the sub fans and opinion-neutrals were.

So in spite of the lack of English dubbing, is the English translation in this game good? Well, it's passable if this was a set of business documents, but it can feel a bit off if you say the lines out loud (and in context with the original scenes). I used to do my own English dub for undubbed games like WO3 as a bit of a placebo to fill the void. In recent years though, when I see how Koei Tecmo have translated their undubbed games, I've had this feeling like... if I were doing the translation, I wouldn't have translated some lines the way they were. Sometimes there's no contractions, sometimes there's contractions in lines which would sound better without, sometimes sentences are a bit wordy when they could be expressed better, and sometimes the way some characters' lines are translated makes them feel out of character compared to the original games.

And that's not counting the translation errors as well. Even in this game alone, I've called out how "Mirror Realm" stages should be "Divine Mirror" stages, plus there's the Charm/Curse Sorcerer mixup in Gauntlet Mode. Look, I acknowledge that older games have made mistakes here and there, even with non-English translations, but for some reason, the lack of English dub in modern era games has made me focus on the English translation in general. I don't think it's a coincidence that the translation quality of a game drops when Koei Tecmo decides not to dub a game, and aside from myself, Sex Gravy is the only other person who called it out. Or maybe I'm just being petty over translation errors and choices because I'm butthurt over the lack of an English dub, who knows.

At first I thought that Koei Tecmo were dubtitling their undubbed games and I said that they shouldn't do that. Oh, they're dubtitling the generic officer defeated and 1000 KO lines alright, even the ones for the newer characters, but on closer inspection, it's clear to me that the translations are sub-par and they are lacking in quality control or understanding of the games' context or characters' characterisation in the English dubs. Heh, look at me. I was ragging on Koei Tecmo for dubtitling their games and now I'm ragging on them for not dubtitling them enough.

So if Voicegroup was in charge of the dubbing and localisation of their games since DW4, and WO3 didn't get an English dub, then who was in charge of translating the text in this game? I dug through the credits, and the answer was... Rubicon Solutions Inc.

Rubicon Solutions are a Japanese company providing translation services in all kinds of languages and industries, including the gaming industry. I think Koei Tecmo began to outsource their translations away from themselves or Voicegroup after the classic era, because DW6 and Empires had the involvement of Babel Media Ltd, which was acquired by Keywords Studios in 2014. Rubicon Solutions has been credited for localisations (really they were just in the list of companies) since Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce in 2009. The last game Rubicon was involved in was Warriors Orochi 4 Ultimate in 2020 before they changed to Digital Hearts Co. Ltd for Samurai Warriors 5 in 2021 and beyond. Rubicon has even been credited alongside Voicegroup in dubbed games during the modern era as well.

My theory is that Rubicon Solutions did the translation, then the translated text went to Voicegroup because they had to produce the English dub, and so they made their own changes to it. But when Koei Tecmo decided not to dub WO3, Voicegroup wasn't there to correct the translations, and despite Koei Tecmo having their own staff in charge of localisation (or Western divisions who could have contributed to it), the English text turned out the way it is. And yet the company claims that their translations "are handled by experienced native speakers". "First rate translations" my ass.

Despite Koei Tecmo releasing subsequent updates, patches and rereleases for their games (even over a decade later), not once have they bothered to scrutinise and correct their translations. It's because of this that I've elected to play Koei Warriors games in Japanese or Chinese (particularly for the purposes of this series), because Koei Tecmo's treatment of their game localisations has made me bitter towards them and I would rather not be constantly reminded why I am.

So after all these years, have I ever come to something that is close enough to an official explanation? Well, yes. Back in 2017, some wrestlefag named Sangre Muerte Guerrera (which has to be a fake name lol) claimed that Koei Tecmo actually said that it cost them too much money to dub their games; I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he said "If you want proof, find it yourself" and then blocked me, leading me to believe that he was just talking shit. But after doing some digging some time back, I realised that someone did talk about it, and that someone was Chin.

Credit for the below screenshot needs to go to NautoAis. He is another small-time content creator like myself who has also made rants and rambles on the topic of English dubs, even if they are admittedly hard to follow. Apologies for the blurry screenshot, but in it, Chin (and another fan) basically implies or confirms that it's sales and budget issues behind Koei Tecmo's decision not to dub their games. That doesn't mean the wrestlefag is forgiven though, he still responded rudely to me even though I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Look, I'm sorry, but I don't believe that money is the reason, if not the only reason that Koei Tecmo aren't dubbing all of their games, and even if it was, I want to hear it from Koei Tecmo themselves and not some fanboys who think they know better than the Japanese gaming company they idolise. I do believe, however, that Koei Tecmo doesn't care about their Western fanbase; the only things they seem to care about are either money or their Japanese fanbase. To quote Jim Sterling:

For a series already facing criticism of laziness, the Warriors games would continue to recycle its content endlessly for a spinoff after a spinoff and do a half-arsed job of localising it at the same time, and while I'll freely admit that getting 120 English voice actors to redub 120 characters in Warriors Orochi 3 is an expensive prospect, when most of your assets are being reused and you're not even releasing a physical edition (in the US), when you're rereleasing and rereleasing the same fucking game, […] I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest you're either in deep financial trouble or you are a stingy fuck if you can't finish the localisation job.

Obviously, my ideal scenario with these games is that they come with Japanese and English voice options from release and on the disc. In the end, the situation with English dubbing and Western localisation is but a microcosm of bigger issues at Koei Tecmo that the issue has snowballed into; this dismal degradation of the Koei Warriors series that people like Jim Sterling, Sex Gravy and DrakeVagabond have called out is something I like to call the Koei Tecmo New Normal Copium, because us fans weren't happy with the direction that Koei Tecmo was taking and we're clearly crying and coping harder about it, something that the fanboy cucks clearly love to see from us.

Going back to my earlier point about my fears with a crowdfunded dub, given the treatment of the English dubbing in the postmodern era games (DW9 and Origins), I'm unironically glad that Koei Tecmo didn't bother to go back and dub their modern era rereleases because I fear that the potential dub would never live up to the quality of the Voicegroup dub. I'm still playing the games in Japanese or Chinese because I'm still disgusted with how they didn't get an English dub in the first place or how Rubicon Solutions fucked up the translations, let's get that right.

So to answer my questions from the start of the last instalment; Have my opinions changed over the past decade? Do I still stand by my statement telling Koei Tecmo and their fanboys to commit seppuku (I said sudoku then because it was before the break)? Is Warriors Orochi 3 still a good game despite the disgraceful localisation treatment? For the first two questions, yes and no. Yes, I've reflected on my opinions and made them clearer and more nuanced. No, I've seen how Koei Tecmo treats their fans and how their fanbase treats people with different opinions, so yeah, I still stand by my extreme comment. Until I get a hard confirmation from Koei Tecmo themselves, I'm willing to be the guy who insists on being wrong even when other people say they're right or that I guessed right. That was the whole reason why I sent Alec and Shanna off to do research on this topic.

Because when you have a company that's clearly spinning and burning itself out by recycling content, cutting corners by not dubbing their games or doing proper quality control, refusing to advertise their games, grubbing every cent they can from their fans by releasing tons and tons of expansions, ports, spinoffs and DLC, and neglecting feedback from anyone but their shareholders, hardcore fans and the Japanese fanbase, and you combine it with a neglected Western fanbase who are too spineless and short-sighted to support other people's opinions and stand with them instead of shutting them down and cancelling them because their problems don't affect them, along with a community manager who only listens to #KTFamily fanboys and only does the bare minimum of engagement with the rest of the fanbase on social media, do you know what you get?

Spoiler alert - you get Dynasty Warriors 9.

This rant has honestly taken longer than normal for me to write because I wanted to get as much as I could into this. I've called out a lot of problems and suggested a lot of solutions over the years, plus I've learnt more and more about these issues over time. I've worked on the retrospective for WO3 since the start of January and I've frequently revisited it to add or correct things, so you'll forgive me if I've neglected to mention or correct something.

If you want to look further into this, you can take a look at the Koei Warriors Rant Series and Dub Logistics, but keep in mind that those posts were written from 2014-2018, so circumstances, facts, views and opinions may have changed over the years. I've also slipped a few rants about Koei Tecmo or localisation in other posts, particularly in regards to Koei Warriors games, so those are things as well. Of course, there is still more to talk about as we continue towards and get to DW9, so look forward to that.

By the way, if you went "tl;dr" at any point in that rant (especially if you go out of your way to tell me about it), you are part of the problem.

To answer the third question, Warriors Orochi 3 is an amazing game. It covers the consequences of humanity's battles with Orochi and the Ultimate expansion also covers Orochi's tragic backstory. There's a diverse range of characters (and movesets) not just from the Koei Warriors series, but from other games as well, and there is just so, so much you can do in this game, even if you just play Story Mode. The release of the Definitive Edition on PC is icing on an already-eaten cake too. It's just a shame that all this awesomeness is marred by a disgraceful, seppuku-worthy localisation and most people don't seem to have a problem with it.

Anyway, I've wasted enough of my time and yours with this game. Now that I've got most of what I wanted to say off my chest, we continue riding the peak of the modern era and the New Normal Copium next time as we cover Dynasty Warriors 8.

[seairexim]

The Growing Import of Spices in India: Key Insights for Spice Importers

India has long been celebrated as the "Land of Spices," known for its rich diversity in spices that add flavor, aroma, and color to cuisines worldwide. While India is a major exporter of spices, it also actively imports spices to meet the increasing domestic demand for exotic and specific varieties not produced locally. In 2024, the import of spices in India reflects an expanding spice market driven by culinary trends, health consciousness, and demand for unique flavors. This article explores import of spices in India, opportunities for importers of Indian spices, essential data on spices import, and how to navigate the import process effectively.

Overview of the Import of Spices in India

India’s spice imports primarily consist of spices not widely cultivated within its borders, such as cloves, vanilla, saffron, and certain types of peppers. The import of spices in India also fills seasonal gaps and addresses the rising demand from India’s booming food industry, health and wellness sectors, and individual consumers keen on experimenting with new flavors. According to recent spices import data, India’s import volume has steadily grown, indicating an appetite for high-quality, exotic spices from regions like Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

India imports a range of spices, including:

Cloves: Commonly imported from Madagascar, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia

Vanilla: Sourced from countries like Madagascar and Mexico

Cinnamon: Primarily imported from Sri Lanka

Saffron: Sourced from Iran and Spain, where it is a major crop

Other Spices: Including nutmeg, paprika, and star anise

Factors Driving the Import of Spices in India

Several factors contribute to the increased import of spices in India:

Rising Culinary Demand: A surge in India’s food industry has amplified demand for exotic spices. Hotels, restaurants, and cafes are constantly innovating menus, blending Indian spices with imported ones.

Health and Wellness Trends: Health-conscious consumers are seeking spices known for their medicinal benefits. Spices like saffron and cinnamon, renowned for their health-boosting properties, are in high demand.

Supply Chain Diversification: Importers of Indian spices are exploring various international sources to mitigate risks associated with local supply disruptions, ensuring consistent availability of diverse spices year-round.

These trends signal a strong market for spice imports, benefiting suppliers and importers who can deliver quality products that meet Indian standards and consumer expectations.

Importers of Indian Spices: Key Players and Their Role

The import of spices in India is facilitated by a range of stakeholders, including large importing companies, smaller import-export businesses, and individual distributors who bring foreign spices to local markets. Main importers of Indian spices are:

Large Importers: These companies have well-established networks, sourcing spices from multiple countries. They cater to large-scale buyers like supermarkets, food processing companies, and bulk buyers.

Distributors and Wholesalers: These entities typically import spices in bulk and supply them to local markets, restaurants, and smaller retailers.

Retailers: Some specialized retailers import unique or premium spices directly, targeting niche consumer markets interested in high-quality or hard-to-find spices.

For importers of Indian spices, understanding and catering to Indian taste preferences is essential. Most spices are preferred in whole, unprocessed forms, with an increasing demand for organic or sustainably sourced options.

Importing Spices from India: Regulations and Compliance

When importing spices into India, it is critical to understand the regulations set by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) and other regulatory bodies. Compliance ensures product safety, quality, and traceability, all crucial in the spice industry.

Some key regulatory requirements include:

FSSAI Approval: Importers must obtain licenses from FSSAI, ensuring their spices meet Indian food safety standards.

Labeling Requirements: Imported spices must have clear labeling, including product name, net weight, country of origin, and manufacturing and expiry dates.

Organic Certifications: For organic spices, FSSAI requires certification from authorized bodies like APEDA, recognized under India's organic standards.

Adhering to these guidelines protects importers and ensures that the products reach consumers safely and legally.

Analyzing Spices Import Data in India

Spices import data provides valuable insights into demand trends, preferred varieties, sourcing countries, and pricing patterns. In 2024, spices import data reveals several important patterns:

Volume Growth: Year-on-year data shows consistent growth in the volume of cloves, vanilla, and saffron imports.

Major Import Sources: Top sources include Madagascar for vanilla, Iran and Spain for saffron, and Sri Lanka for cinnamon.

Value Trends: Due to inflation and global price volatility, the cost of certain spices has risen, particularly in high-demand categories like saffron and vanilla.

By analyzing spices import data, importers and businesses can strategize more effectively, identifying high-demand spices and potentially profitable sources.

Challenges in Importing Spices from India

Despite the strong market, importing spices from India involves challenges:

Price Volatility: Spices are sensitive to climatic conditions and global demand, leading to fluctuating prices. Importers must stay updated on pricing to manage costs effectively.

Quality Assurance: Ensuring consistent quality can be challenging, especially for perishable or high-value spices like saffron. Importers need reliable suppliers with good storage and transport practices.

Regulatory Compliance: Meeting stringent FSSAI standards, as well as handling documentation, requires careful attention to regulatory details.

Addressing these challenges requires a strong network, efficient logistics, and a clear understanding of quality standards.

Future Outlook and Opportunities for Importers of Indian Spices

The future of the Indian spice import market is promising, with ongoing growth expected in 2024 and beyond. Several trends indicate potential opportunities for importers:

Growing Demand for Organic Spices: Health-conscious consumers increasingly prefer organic products, opening a niche market for certified organic spices.

Innovative Spice Blends: There is potential for importing unique spice blends that complement Indian flavors, catering to the fusion cuisine trend.

Technology and Traceability: Blockchain and other technologies are becoming popular in the food industry for traceability. Importers focusing on transparency and safety can attract more buyers.

Tips for Importing Spices from India Successfully

For those looking to enter or expand in the Indian spice market, here are some essential tips:

Source Reliable Suppliers: Build relationships with reputable suppliers to ensure consistent quality and avoid disruptions.

Understand Market Preferences: Research the spices most in demand, including seasonal and regional preferences.

Stay Updated on Regulations: Regularly check FSSAI updates and other regulatory changes that may impact import rules.

Utilize Import Data: Leverage spices import data to make informed decisions on sourcing, pricing, and demand patterns.

Conclusion

The import of spices in India is a dynamic and expanding market with significant potential for growth. Importers of Indian spices, from large-scale distributors to specialty retailers, have ample opportunity to cater to India’s diverse and discerning palate. By understanding market trends, sourcing high-quality products, and adhering to regulatory standards, importers can successfully tap into this vibrant sector and thrive in 2024. Whether aiming to introduce exotic spices or maintain a consistent supply of high-demand varieties, the Indian spice import market offers a rewarding landscape for those with strategic vision and a dedication to quality. However if you need spices import data, spices Hs code or global trade data connect with impoty and export data provider like Seair Exim Solutions.

Also Read: Import of Oil in India: A 2024 Overview

[skilldux]

Recurrent Neural Network Courses:

In the field of deep learning, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have emerged as a key component, especially for processing sequential input such as text, audio, and time series. RNNs possess loops that enable them to retain information over time steps, which sets them apart from standard feed forward neural networks and makes them particularly effective for jobs requiring context. This article will explore the role that RNNs play in deep learning, including how to train them efficiently and which courses are the best to become proficient in them.

Neural networks of the RNN class are very good at handling data sequences, which makes them perfect for time series prediction, machine translation, and natural language processing (NLP). RNNs' "memory their ability to retain data from past inputs in their hidden states and use that information to affect subsequent outputs is its primary characteristic.

Why Use RNNs in Deep Learning?

Sequential data is frequently essential for deep learning. RNNs can capture dependencies across time in a variety of applications, including interpreting phrase context, assessing a series of photographs, and forecasting market prices based on historical trends. They are therefore especially well-suited for tasks involving sequential patterns and context. But problems like vanishing gradients make vanilla RNNs unreliable on lengthy sequences, which might impede learning. Thankfully, more sophisticated versions have been developed to get around these restrictions, such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU).

Recurrent Neural Network Training:

When training RNNs, there are a few different problems than with standard neural networks. Back propagation Through Time (BPTT), a technique for propagating error gradients through time, is used in the process of modifying the weights based on sequential input data. Optimization is challenging, though, because traditional back propagation frequently encounters problems like vanishing or ballooning gradients, particularly with lengthy sequences.

The following are some crucial factors to take into account when training RNNs:

i)Selecting the Correct Architecture:

When handling lengthy sequences or intricate dependencies, LSTM and GRU networks frequently outperform vanilla RNNs.

ii)Optimization Strategies:

While learning rate schedules and batch normalization can enhance convergence, gradient clipping can help reduce the effects of expanding gradient issues.

iii)Regularization:

Especially when working with large datasets, dropout and other regularization techniques help prevent overfitting.

iv)Hardware Points to Remember:

 RNN training can be computationally demanding; therefore, making use of GPUs and distributed computing frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow can greatly accelerate the training process.

Top Courses on Recurrent Neural Networks:

Numerous Best online courses are available to help you become proficient with RNNs; they include both theoretical information and real-world, practical experience. Here are a few highly suggested items:

i)Andrew Ng's Deep Learning Specialization:

A thorough introduction to deep learning is provided by this course, which also includes a thorough module on sequence models that covers RNN in deep learning, LSTMs, and GRUs. TensorFlow is used in both theoretical and hands-on Python coding projects in Andrew Ng's course.

ii)An Introduction to Recurrent Neural Networks:

For those who are new to RNNs, this course is a fantastic place to start. It goes over the fundamentals of RNN theory, shows you how to use Keras to create RNNs in Python, and contains a number of projects, including sentiment analysis and text generation.

iii) Deep learning and advanced NLP:

While it covers more ground than simply RNNs and touches on more complex architectures like Transformer models, Stanford's NLP with deep learning course is a great resource for anyone interested in learning how RNNs fit into the larger picture of NLP. Comprehensive coverage of GRU and LSTM networks is included.

iv)PyTorch for AI and Deep Learning:

For individuals who would rather use PyTorch than TensorFlow, this course is perfect. It uses PyTorch to teach RNNs and other sequence models, with real-world examples including time series data prediction and character-level language model implementation.

In summary,

Deep learning has advanced significantly, thanks in large part to recurrent neural networks, particularly in fields where sequential data processing is necessary. However, it takes both theoretical knowledge and AI-Applications to properly teach them and comprehend their subtleties. Anyone may learn RNNs and use them to solve a wide range of challenging issues, from predictive analytics to language processing, if they enroll in the appropriate courses.

Investing through SkillDux in RNN courses can provide you with a thorough understanding of sequence models and the skills necessary to effectively address real-world problems, regardless of your level of experience.

[limbonacci]

limbonacci

US-ENG | PST | Java Edition

Purgatory-bound parallelbiped.

I — About Limbo

I am Limbo, a Minecraft player with a passion for large-scale creative building, architecture, and mathematics. Whether that be overly faithful reconstructions of fictional architecture or original designs, I will devote an incomprehensible amount of time and energy to my constructs to satisfy my babelesque desires. However, within this cuboidal heart of mine also lies a great appreciation for the ocean. I love fish.

II — About the Blog

It is here that I will be documenting and archiving the progress of my current and finished builds. This would include screenshots, video tours, occasional walkthroughs, and mathematical (and mental) breakdowns.

III — About Minecraft

I often build in the latest version, latest being relative to the availability of the mods that I am using. That being said, I will not be going earlier than the 1.20 update. All my mods run on Fabric, and all additional mods and resources (i.e data packs, shaders, textures) will be cited per finished work. However, I do use the following the most consistently:

Axiom

WorldEdit + WorldEditCUI

Litematica

I generally do try to avoid heavier mods to have my builds be compatible for gameplay and my computer’s well-being, so you can expect to see most of my builds be Vanilla-friendly, if not, Axiom dependent at the least. All of my builds are original in their designs, if not their designs, then their interpretations.

If you have any questions regarding my work, or if you would like to collaborate or just have someone to play Minecraft with. Feel free to reach out!

LN.

catalogue

NOTE — Each build will have their own tags for the sake of organization.

I — 100-THR Earthmover (Ultrakill) — IN PROGRESS

#MCLNLATHUK

II — Ship of Fools (Ultrakill) — IN PROGRESS

#MCLNSOFUK

III — Fat Official’s Tower, Boletaria (Demon Souls) — TERMINATED

#MCLNFOTDS

IV — Clair De Lune (Ultrakill) — REVISION CONSIDERED

#MCLNCDLUK